Reinventing Version Control with Glitch Rewind

Doing Things the Hard Way #

When you’re in the middle of coding, nothing’s more frustrating than the risk of losing the work you’ve been doing. And nothing’s more liberating than knowing you can undo any of your mistakes at any time if you need to.

Right now, the answer to those problems is overly-complicated version control solutions. Coders are forced to learn a frustrating system where they spend way too much time trying to remember obscure commands and worrying that they might accidentally break their project. And those who aren’t coders just figure this is another one of those barriers that keep people out.

It all adds up to a situation where people don’t create, experiment and innovate like they want to, because making a mistake has too high a cost.

But it doesn’t have to be like this.

There’s a fundamentally better way to undo errors in your code and review any point in the past history of your project: Glitch Rewind.

Simplifying Version Control #

Glitch Rewind is the easiest, most powerful version control for coders, ever. As you work, Glitch automatically checks in your code, even handling multiple authors seamlessly. (Because Glitch lets you and your collaborators code together in real-time!) Then, with Rewind, you can see every change, every commit, and walk backwards in time through all those edits, just by scrolling back on the timeline. It’s as easy as rewinding a video on YouTube.

But Glitch’s rewind feature does even more.

You can see who edited a file, with their avatar right next to their changes. You can see how big a change was to a file by the size of the bar. You can tell what kind of file was changed because everything’s color-coded, just like in the Glitch editor’s file list. And if you import a project from GitHub, your history comes with it.

But best of all, you already know how to use it.

By seeing the history of your project laid out in front of you, knowing who changed what and when — your confidence grows. You never have to worry about losing a single line of code, and you know you’re safe to try out ideas because undoing mistakes is a piece of cake.

Behind the scenes, it’s still just regular Git — you can use Glitch’s console to run Git commands to work with your code if you want to do things the hard way. You can use your git tools with your Glitch project just like it’s a regular git repo, because it is. We just think that once you’ve used the interface, you won’t want to go back to being nervous about making a commit or trying to wrap your head around git HEAD issues.

We’re enabling Glitch Rewind for beautiful and brilliant version control on every Glitch project, for free today.

So far this week, we’ve announced embeds, an improved development experience, and now Rewind. But we’re not done yet, check back tomorrow for our final announcement of the week as Glitch comes out of beta and gets ready to greet the world.