Sharing a small update on a project I’ve been dedicating some time to: qwe v0.2.6.

Like many developers, I’ve occasionally found myself wishing for a bit more finesse when managing changes in larger repositories. This led me to begin exploring qwe, a novel version control system designed around the idea of granular, targeted change tracking.

The core concept is to move away from repository-wide tracking as a default, giving users the ability to define highly specific version control scopes.

Essentially, you can choose to track any combination of assets:

A single, crucial file.

All contents within a specific directory.

A hand-picked, non-contiguous selection of files across your subdirectories.

qwe turns the repository from a single, monolithic tracking unit into a collection of versioning domains, allowing teams to manage complexity by only seeing and tracking what is relevant to their specific task. For instance:

In monorepo, with qwe, a developer working on frontend/project-A can define their scope to just that directory. Their commits and history operations only apply to those files, avoiding noise and performance drag from changes in backend/service-B or docs/wiki.

qwe allows users to track only the small configuration or metadata files for a large asset, or even track the large asset itself only within a very specific, isolated scope. This keeps the main, shared repository clean, while giving the specialized team the version control they need for their specific files.

Instead of juggling git stash and cherry-picks to isolate a single file change from a working branch, qwe allows you to create a version of just that file or a small, non-contiguous selection of patch files across different folders, ensuring only the fix is committed and deployed.

A DevOps engineer might want to track changes to the config/prod.yaml file completely separately from application code changes. With qwe, they can define a tracking scope on just that file or directory. Their commits related to configuration changes are isolated and reviewed independently of feature development.

The hope is that this capability will allow us to commit and revert versions exactly where they are needed, helping keep our repositories cleaner and more focused.

It’s still very much a work in progress, and I am learning a lot along the way. I would be genuinely grateful for any contribution and star at https://github.com/mainak55512/qwe