Git Revision Tracker

Track your writing progress across all phases of your project – from the first draft to final revisions. Unlike simple word‑count trackers, Git Progress Tracker analyses your Git commits to distinguish between new writing, deletions, and revisions, giving you a realistic picture of the work you’ve actually done.

Features

• True revision detection – By comparing word‑frequency changes in each commit, Git Progress Tracker knows when you’re rewriting existing text rather than just adding or removing words.
• Levenshtein‑based word‑level diff – Revisions are measured precisely: replacing one word with another counts as one change, not two.
• Rich progress metrics
  • Net word difference
  • Gross work volume (all words touched)
  • Pure revision effort
• Git‑Hub–style heatmap – A clean, scrollable heatmap shows your daily progress over the project’s lifetime. Hover to see exact scores.
• Three views
  1. Overview – Heatmap + aggregated totals
  2. By Commit – Per‑commit breakdown
  3. By Day – Daily summaries, sorted chronologically
• Customisable weighting – Assign different weights to new words, deleted words, and revised words to match your personal definition of “progress”.
• Automatic daily goal tracking – Set a target for your weighted progress; the heatmap colours show how close you came each day.
• Flexible file filtering – Include only the files you care about (e.g. **/*.md) using glob patterns.
• Author filter – Count only your own commits in shared repositories.
• Dark & Light mode – Colours adapt automatically to Obsidian’s theme.

Requirements

• Your Obsidian vault must be a Git repository (or a subfolder of one).
  The plugin does not manage Git itself – use your favourite Git client (CLI, GitHub Desktop, etc.).
• Git must be installed and available in your PATH.
• It is recommended to write each sentence on a separate line so that the plugin can work effectively.

Installation

From Obsidian Community Plugins (coming soon)

1. Open Settings → Community Plugins.
2. Disable Safe mode if necessary.
3. Click Browse and search for “Git Revision Tracker”.
4. Install and enable the plugin.

Manual installation

1. Download the latest release from GitHub Releases.
2. Extract the folder into <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/git-revision-tracker/.
3. Reload Obsidian.
4. Enable the plugin under Settings → Community Plugins → Installed Plugins.

Getting Started

1. Enable the plugin and open the settings to configure your preferences.
2. Click the feather icon in the ribbon (or use the command “Git Progress Tracker: Update Progress”) to analyse your Git history.
3. Open the Progress View via the ribbon icon or the command palette.
4. Explore the three tabs:
   • Overview – Heatmap and total statistics.
   • By Commit – See what changed in each commit.
   • By Day – Daily aggregated numbers.
5. Use the “Rotate view” button to swap the axes of the heatmap.
6. Adjust the weighting and daily goal in the settings until the progress numbers feel right to you.

Settings

Metrics explained

How revision detection works

1. Git Progress Tracker pulls the unified diff for each commit.
2. Within each file, consecutive blocks of deleted (-) and added (+) lines that are not separated by context lines are paired as revisions.
3. For each revision block, the plugin tokenises the old and new lines into words.
4. It then calculates the Levenshtein distance on the word level, treating word substitution as a single change.
5. The result is stored as revisionWords (the number of individual word changes) and revisionNetWords (the net difference in word count).

This means that if you change three words in a 19‑word sentence, the plugin counts three revisions, not 38.