Git

A couple of years ago, I was modding a fresh install of Skyrim and thought, "I can use git branches to make it easy to switch between different mod combinations rather than uninstalling/reinstalling mods when something breaks or when I want to change things up." Worked well!

I had branches that were mostly vanilla with enhancements, and then branches that had all kinds of ridiculous mods. If I wanted to switch to playing a ridiculous build of Skyrim, I'd just close the game, checkout the branch I wanted, and start the game.

There's a gut repo of the German constitution (Grundgesetz) with all changes with correct dates and authors:

https://github.com/c3e/grundgesetz

And it exists for all laws in Germany, too: https://bundestag.github.io/gesetze/

Created/funded by a government sponsored fund for open source software

I use it to backup my save games. Not sure if that's conventional.

For example, I'd MKLink %appdata%/Local/Pal/Save/ to a folder in my save repo, and commit that every once in a while.

I wanted to automate the setup of my desktop environment, but didn't know what got changed in the individual config files when I tweaked a setting in the UI.

So, I did a git init in ~/.config/, added all files to an initial commit, and then made the change in the UI. Afterwards, a git diff showed the exact changes I wanted.

Writing a novel:

https://craphound.com/news/2009/02/13/flashbake-free-version-control-for-writers-using-git/

GitFS probably

I used it once for version controlling my master's when I was writing it. I wrote it in Markdown with Pandoc syntax, so it worked. I eventually gave up and just used LibreOffice, though, since it was a hassle

Tracking season-by-season changes to my fantasy football league's charter.

Business logic mermaid diagrams installed as a submodule in every projects repo.

I've put ASTs directly into git repositories by encoding each leaf as a blob and each tree as a tree. Since git objects are content-addressed, this gives deduplication of ASTs for free, including CSE for sufficiently-pure ASTs.

Not very clever or rare, but extremely useful. On my persistent Unix/Linux boxes, I "git branch /etc" as soon as it comes up. Then all of my admin config gets committed whenever it's changed.

I tried to take hourly snapshots of an already-large Minecraft world using Git, but after a few years of snapshots, the repository became corrupted.

One of the issues was that regardless of any player-based changes that occurred, the spawn regions were always different as they were always loaded in memory.

I just discovered from So You Think You Know Git - FOSDEM 2024 that you can use Git to generate columns:

seq 1 24 | git column --mode=column --padding=5

Will render:

1      3      5      7      9      11     13     15     17     19     21     23
2      4      6      8      10     12     14     16     18     20     22     24

It can be useful to list files / permissions in a directory in multiples columns

ls -lah | git column --mode=column --padding=5

(Ok, it's useless)