I've done emacs org mode on git, and it works. I've thankfully never had to do a manual merge, I wonder what org mode thinks of git merge commentary inside the file. I imagine you'd have to drop out of org mode and into text mode to fix the merge.

I've also used a wiki as what amounts to little more than a note taking app, and it works. There are a couple wikis that can speak git as a backend store.

I can't begin to imagine why someone would build a note-taking app that wasn't build on a standard version control system such as mercurial or git.

Is there a rationale for paperwork not doing this? I'd like to hear it.

Magpie, which I think was on HN a few weeks back, is an attempt at precisely this.

https://magpie-notes.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

I must have missed it a few weeks back, but thanks for mentioning this because it's just what I need!

You might like to take a look at Irmin [1], which seems like it would make it easier to get what you're after. It's also part of a larger stack that will make distributed programming a lot easier when it lands [2].

[1] http://openmirage.org/blog/introducing-irmin

[2] http://nymote.org/blog/2015/brewing-miso-to-serve-nymote/

Better yet -- CouchDB and PouchDB. You can use PouchDB for the browser side, CouchDB for the server, and Couchbase Mobile for the eventual mobile apps. Pros: offline and online; natural fit for document management; git-like revision and conflict management; simple to set up replication for backup. Cons: it's fallen out of favor; nobody seems to like writing the mapreduce code for searching and views.

PouchDB dev here. The map/reduce API is definitely a bit cumbersome, which is why we're replacing it: http://nolanlawson.github.io/pouchdb-find/ :)

Draft (http://draftin.com) is a great version-controlled writing app, though it's not what I would call note-taking. Interesting idea though!

Yes, me. :) I'm intermittently working on an Android app that syncs to Git. I'm using it for my notes, but it's still pretty rough to share widely.

Because you want autosave to the cloud, and autosave to git would be very weighty.