Posted by zdgeier 1 day ago
Oak is still early in development. There's no Windows build and missing plenty of features (no CI, no issues, no comments). We still use GitHub Actions for building Oak now, but we've been fully bootstrapped on Oak with no Git backup for several months: https://oak.space/oak/oak.
Blog post: https://oak.space/blog#git-is-forever
Docs: https://oak.space/docs
It's absolutely great for keeping a bunch of exploratory changes alive, quick prototyping, etc. as I tend to do with basically every source I have on my machine. I don't have to think at all about the stuff I hate about git (babying the index, being careful to amend and etc. right the first time because undos are annoying, etc.)
Does not support LFS or submodules though.
We still use submodules in a number of places at work so it’s a bit of friction for me. Other than that, I’m rapidly becoming a jj convert.
It actually works quite well and has never caused me any issues. I tried symlinking but that does not work, git doesn't like the .git being a symlink.
Relatedly, when I use filesystem paths as remotes they need to be colocated or else it doesn't work, which is a little annoying!
Edit: this was actually announced at a very recent blog post (11 july 2026 so just 11 days ago): https://zed.dev/blog/introducing-deltadb
The blogpost also has some more relevant information as well.
The problem space and solution has been around for a while in big tech, and now there is a handful known products publicly known, and probably a couple dozen still secret ones. It is just now with AI/agents volume, there probably needs to be an easier solution for quick narrowly focused VCS views.
For filesystem mount, usually FUSE-FS, of a version control system to enable multiple viewers without transferring a lot of data see some current/previous implementations:
- Google: Piper via CitC (Clients in the Cloud) often used with Cider (web IDE)
- Meta: Sapling on EdenFS (from what I read, never worked there)
- Rational Clearcase, anyone else remember mounting VOBs?
The main issue I see is with the site -- it just seems like a big blob of AI-generated text I need to understand what is going on. The cool part wasn't even shown off: your GitHub UI clone that you can get to from seeing the benchmark code.
FYI, I also think the 4-way arrows logo has been used before, and still might be in use. I tried searching, but I think I saw a multi-colored one, maybe in a UK-based IT corporate training company's class I attended.
This looks interesting regardless, but I do wonder if the latency focus is the wrong way to sell this.
Setup: a Linux box on the other side of Romania (compared to where I am living) reading from a Windows box in Singapore (~200 ms RTT)
- reading 1 MiB of a 1 GB remote file pulls only 16 MiB (~98% avoided) - this is because of my fine tuning optimization choice - first byte approx: 2.3s - git-LFS repos also clone cold over the mount byte-perfect (separate Mac - Linux run on a ~20 ms RTT)
The thing that I do differently is that my metadata is eagerly pushed, as I optimized for content streaming.
And 100k-file tree mounts I did not test yet.
But my goal was to have instant file access for generic files between apps, and peer to peer, supports also Windows :D
here is the tool: https://github.com/KeibiSoft/KeibiDrop
From hacker news guidelines https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If I split a file in two I still want to be able to see blame correctly for the author of the function, not one file as freshly created and the other with a bunch of deletes. I wish commits could be folded into larger commits so that you can still capture the individual changes but also not see them by default when looking at the history of a file.
Just a more human centric perspective on change history where it captures the way we talk and think about changes.
Fossil merges do this. More people need to use Fossil; it's got a ton of great ideas.
"If I split a file in two I still want to be able to see blame correctly for the author of the function, not one file as freshly created and the other with a bunch of deletes."
Now this is a good idea that I've never seen in a VCS.
There's a reason no one has done that, the VCS would have to have a semantic understanding of what it's tracking. I'm sure that's possible, but I think would see extremely limited success. Honestly, it may have even been done for proprietary languages and VCS systems that have since faded into obscurity.
I'd settle for searching the git history for a particular regex/string and then running a blame on that.
2) language sensitive version control seems like the next thing. We need like an LSP for VCSes.
`git split`
Something that I enjoy with jujutsu is that the semantics is the tool itself. ONCE you do that, the rest become easier!
