I am trying to figure out a way where Revision Mode can be compatible with removing text.
I was hoping that simply deleting the text would make it show in the Revision Mode color. That didn’t work so I tried cutting the text then changing modes and pasting the text but that also doesn’t work.
I could simply change the color of the text but I’m dealing with many files and I would like to have some meta-data about the changes.
Why not use overstrike? That will put an overstrike through the text in the revision colour.
(Format>Font>Strikethrough or shift-cmd-underscore)
This doesn’t involve revisions directly (though it can be easily synchronised with it), but I use inline annotations for deletions, which has a number of advantages. All you have to do is select the text and hit Shift-Cmd-A. Now it can be dropped out of compile entirely, and so does not require to remove it until you are certain it should be removed. When it does come time to remove them, I take a snapshot and then use the special copy command in the edit menu to copy without annotations—pasting right back over the source text and thus stripping them all out at once.
The only drawback to this way of working is that it doesn’t work as well with footnotes. There are no problems with it up until you reach the point of removing deletions since the special copy command also strips footnotes. It isn’t a massive problem though, as you can use the Find by Format tool to quickly jump through and wipe out annotations by phrase and/or colour. This is what you need to do with the overstrike method in all cases, anyway, so it isn’t a huge drawback all things considered.
Then on the matter of colour: to synchronise them with your revision level, just place the cursor anywhere in the annotation and click the text colour button in the format bar once. Now your annotations will use this colour from that point onward and you can view removals by revision.
Not being an official part of revisions is perfectly fine by the way. The revision feature is really just a handy way of enforcing a defined text colour to a common value that can be later used for searching and management of the revision markings. Beyond that there is nothing special about it, so using a separate feature and colour-syncing that feature is, in the end, effective.