Version control of Mathematica notebooks

Question

Mathematica notebooks are, of course, plaintext files -- it seems reasonable to expect that they should play nice with a version-control system (git in my case, although I d

Answer 1

Along the lines of what Simon and Kena were saying, when I have had Mathematica .nb's under version control, I often create a plain-text version of only the input code and save it with the same name but a .txt extension. While this doesn't directly solve the merging problem, it does make diff-ing work in a reasonable way and makes manual merging more obvious when I go back to edit the .nb's later. There are still some idiosyncrasies in this format, but it is MUCH easier to read than the raw .nb format.

To generate the text file, I just copy the notebook into a new blank notebook (with shortcuts, Ctrl-A,C,N,V), select the menu Cell->Delete All Output, copy the result (Ctrl-A,C), and paste the result into a plain text editor to save it. It takes surprisingly little time once you get the hang of it.