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Quickstart: Stop Losing Work to Google Drive

You've been there. Two people edit the same Word doc. Someone saves over someone else's work. Google Drive creates "Copy of proposal_FINAL_v2_REAL.docx." There has to be a better way. There is.

Install (10 seconds)

Head to github.com/WyattAu/suture/releases, grab the binary for your OS, and drop it somewhere on your PATH. On a Mac with Homebrew:

brew tap WyattAu/suture-merge-driver
brew install suture-merge-driver

On Linux or Windows, download from GitHub Releases and unzip. That's it. No Rust toolchain needed.

Verify it works:


$ suture --version
suture 5.3.1

Your First Repository (10 seconds)

cd ~/Documents
suture init


Initialized empty Suture repository in /Users/you/Documents/.suture/

Track your proposal:

suture add proposal.docx
suture commit "initial draft"


[main abc1234] initial draft
 1 file changed, 1 insertion (+1), 0 deletions (-0)

Done. Suture now knows about every paragraph, table, and heading in that document.

Branch and Edit (15 seconds)

Your coworker Alice needs to update the executive summary while you rework the pricing section. No more "I'll wait for you to finish."

suture branch alice-edits
suture checkout alice-edits


Switched to branch 'alice-edits'

Alice opens proposal.docx in Word and rewrites paragraph 2 (the executive summary). She saves, then:

suture add proposal.docx
suture commit "updated executive summary"


[alice-edits def5678] updated executive summary
 1 file changed, 1 insertion (+1), 1 deletion (-1)

Merge Without Tears (15 seconds)

Meanwhile, you've been on main, editing paragraph 5 (the pricing table). You saved and committed:

suture checkout main
# (you edited paragraph 5 in Word)
suture add proposal.docx
suture commit "updated pricing table"

Now bring Alice's changes in:

suture merge alice-edits


Merge made by the 'ort' strategy.
DOCX merge: proposal.docx
  Merged 2 paragraph-level changes (0 conflicts)
  Paragraph 2: updated executive summary  (from alice-edits)
  Paragraph 5: updated pricing table       (from main)
Clean merge. 2 patches applied.

Open proposal.docx. Alice's new executive summary is there. Your pricing table is there. Nothing got overwritten. No conflict markers. No "Copy of" files.

suture log --oneline


*   789abcd Merge branch 'alice-edits'
|\
| * def5678 updated executive summary
* | ghi0123 updated pricing table
|/
* abc1234 initial draft

What Just Happened?

Google Drive (and Dropbox, OneDrive, etc.) treat your .docx file as a black box of bytes. When two people save changes, the last save wins. Period.

Suture cracks open the DOCX file and reads its structure -- paragraphs, headings, tables, images. When Alice changed paragraph 2 and you changed paragraph 5, Suture saw two independent edits to two different parts of the document. It merged them automatically.

This is called semantic merge. It works the same way for Excel (cell-level), PowerPoint (slide-level), JSON (field-level), YAML (key-level), and a dozen other formats.

The result: version control for everything, not just code.

Next Steps

GitHub · AGPL-3.0