Version History
Browse every edit to your manuscript, see what changed, and mark milestones.
What it does
Every save in Skribex creates a version in your book's history. The history page lets you see a timeline of all changes to any chapter or scene, grouped into writing sessions. Click any version to see a prose-level diff showing exactly what you wrote or deleted. Milestones let you name important points in your writing (e.g. "First Draft Complete") so you can find them later.
How to use it
Book history overview — from the dashboard, click "history" to open the book-wide overview at /books/{book}/history. Unlike the per-chapter view, this is a hub for the whole book: the latest change to each chapter, your most recent milestone, the entities you created or edited most recently, and recent timeline activity. Click any chapter to drill into its full per-element history.
Open a chapter's history — click the clock icon in the editor status bar (it opens the current chapter's history), or open History from the sidebar menu for the book-wide overview. From a chapter's history page you can jump up to the whole-book overview with the "All chapters" link in the header.
Sessions — versions are grouped into writing sessions. A gap of more than 5 minutes starts a new session. Each session shows how many edits were made and the total word count change (when available). Click a session to expand and see individual versions.
View changes — click any version within a session to see a prose diff. Added text is highlighted in green, removed text in red with strikethrough. Only changed paragraphs are shown, with ··· separators for unchanged sections. If a version only changed metadata (temporal markers, formatting), you'll see "No prose changes — metadata or formatting only."
What else changed — above the prose diff, a compact summary shows the non-prose changes between the two versions: entity mentions added (green) or removed (red), time markers added or removed, how many footnotes were added or removed, and whether the chapter's own time setting changed. It appears for both a single version's diff and a two-version comparison, and is hidden when nothing in that layer changed.
Compare any two versions — click "Compare versions" in the Sessions header to turn on compare mode. A checkbox appears on every version (and every milestone). Tick two of them — they can be from different sessions, or even two milestones — and the compare bar shows the prose diff between them. The diff always reads oldest-to-newest, so green is what the later version added regardless of the order you picked. Click "Clear" to start over, or "Compare versions" again to leave compare mode.
Footnotes — when footnote content changes between versions, a separate "Footnotes" section appears below the main diff.
Collapse all — click "Collapse all" in the Sessions header to close all expanded sessions and diffs at once.
Create a book milestone — press ⌘S in the editor (or click the flag icon in the status bar) to open the milestone popover. Enter a name and optional description. Milestones are book-wide snapshots — they appear on every element's history page. The milestone records the current total word count across all chapters.
Restore a version — click "Restore" on any version, then confirm. Your chapter is set back to that version's content. Restore is safe: it creates a new checkpoint rather than erasing anything, so every version (including the one you were just on) stays in the history and you can move between them freely. If you had just made an edit that wasn't saved as a checkpoint yet, it's preserved as its own checkpoint before the restore, so nothing is lost.
Notes
- Version IDs are timestamps, not git hashes. If two edits happen in the same minute, they are numbered (e.g. "Feb 20, 14:32 #1", "Feb 20, 14:32 #2").
- Milestones are implemented as annotated git tags, so they persist even if you interact with the book's git repository directly.
- Word count includes entity mention labels (e.g. "Jane" counts as one word) but excludes temporal markers.