Just tried it out, and Dropbox works exactly like a dumb FTP server. Which is ok, but not quite ideal.

One thing I'd really like is a simple filter to exclude directories like .hg, .svn, CVS, etc. To give you a use case, the workflow I'm thinking of is something like this:

- Create a Dropbox folder called "textastic-source".
- Put various source tree checkouts in there.
- Tell Textastic to grab that entire folder, excluding the VCS metadata.
- Make changes with Textastic.
- Upload only the changed files. (I don't want to upload each individual file after I change it)
- I'll take care of the scripts that actually commit the changes to the VCS.

That's about it. If you can use the Dropbox API to intelligently sync changes back from the server (ie, don't re-download identical files), that'd be a bonus.

Licensing issues are probably the biggest problem here, no? Both Git and Mercurial are GPLv2, which means it's effectively impossible to integrate them with a proprietary app. You'd need an independent non-copyleft implementation, preferably in pure C.

If anyone is aware of such a thing, share a link. I found ObjectiveGit, which hasn't been updated in two years, but that's about it.

SVN is probably doable (Apache), though I don't know how much overlap there will be between SVN users and Textastic users.

Notably, it fails to parse Python's triple-quote (''' or """) multi-line strings as such.