Show HN: Collate: Cross platform note taking app based on plain text data format

I'm not sure what backend you're using, but you might find it simpler to integrate Mercurial, as you can basically access it as a Python library [0].

Though, Mercurial doesn't have a particularly great git-export story, so syncing to GitHub or the like is harder. (Fossil has a better story there, with first-class git export, but a different workflow, and harder integration story (a RESTful JSON API)).

Git tends to be harder to integrate with, as there is sort of an expectation you'll maintain a shell process for it. [1]

As to zipping, with Git, you need to zip the whole repo.

Fossil can zip files upon storage, or you can zip the *.fossil file.

Mercurial can bundle with gzip, to simplify things a bit.

My point being, though git can give you some nice places for users to deploy to, it can be a bit of a pain to work with, and a couple other SCM systems might need to be considered. They might make your life a lot easier.

[0] https://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/MercurialApi

[1] https://git-scm.com/book/be/v2/Embedding-Git-in-your-Applica...

Hey thanks for the thoughtful answers! The back end is written with Electron, so I have access to plenty of libs on NPM. I was thinking of utilizing libgit2 with some popular thin wrapper out there and giving it a shot and testing it. If it doesn't work out, I'll check out the other SCM systems as well.

Git is appealing to me personally because it's just so ubiquitous and there are plenty of free services out there to use.

git has libgit2, which has bindings in most languages.