Store

An easy-to-use and simple alternative to a version control system.

There is a single application, str which can be used as a command line tool or as a GUI application.

GUI — store

This provides the same facilities as the command line but can be much more convenient for viewing and diffing previous generations of files.

Run the GUI using:

str G

or

str gui

or

store

where store is a soft link to str.

Command Line — str

Add files:

str a

or

str add

This will glob the files in the current folder and its immediate subfolders and filter out ignored and empty files to present a list of unstored files. It will then prompt for whether to add the files to the store (creating the store if necessary). It will also prompt for updates.

(Use str s -q or str status --quiet in a shell script to provide a list of unstored unignored nonempty files that are candidates to be added; the -q or --quiet prevents the interactive prompting to add or update.)

Alternatively, add specified or globbed files like this:

str a *

or

str add *

This will add all the specified files apart from those that match the default ignore globs (e.g., *.bak, *.o, *.obj, etc.).

You can also add, remove, or list the ignores (filenames, folder names, or globs).

The most common operation is to update the store after changes:

str u

or

str update

or, say,

str u This is an optional comment.

Use

str s

or str status to see if any files need adding or updating.

You can print or extract any previous version of any stored file. You can diff a previous version against the version on disk or against a different previous version.

To see if there are any files not in the store that are not ignored (e.g., new candidates for adding), run str s or str status.

You can also extract all the files in a previous “generation” into a new folder (using the copy command).

The command line application is str; run str help for commands. The GUI app is store.

The generational copies of the added files are stored in .dirname.str.

Store does not support branching, staging, or anything else that’s complicated, making it ideal for small personal projects where you just want to save regular “generations” of your changes and be able to look back in time.

Installation

Unpack anywhere convenient and either put the folder in your PATH or add soft links to str and store.

Dependencies: Tcl/Tk >= 9.0.2; Tcllib >= 2.0; Tklib >= 0.9.

License

GPL-3

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