Glitch Rewind wants to make version control easy for everyone

Glitch, the experimental web development sandbox for beginners created by Fog Creek, today updated its service with a version control tool designed to allow users to revert to previous versions of their code, without the need to learn an expansive and complicated system like Git.

The tool, called Glitch Rewind, aims to make version control as simple as rewinding a YouTube video. As you can see from the video below, it has most of the basic features of a version control system: including attribution, comparisons, and the ability to rewind to a program’s previous state.

But what makes this so compelling is that it’s entirely visual, meaning users aren’t forced to memorize a giant list of git commands. Git’s an extremely powerful tool, and it does a lot of stuff, but that also means there’s a lot to learn.

This is something that company CEO Anil Dash agrees with, saying: “Right now, the state of the art [of version control] is GitHub, and you have to learn git, and git… kind of sucks?”

“Obviously, git is an amazing technological breakthrough, but even the best coders in the world basically have 2 or 3 git commands they’ve memorized and everything else terrifies or frustrates them,” he added.

Glitch is a really interesting project. Fog Creek, which is privately held and has never taken VC money, has essentially created a platform where users can experiment without dealing with the other headaches of coding — like building your own development environment, or facing an unfamiliar command line.

You can check out Glitch Rewind from today.