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Why is it so hard to see code from 5 minutes ago?

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Re: Why is it so hard to see code from 5 minutes ago?

#21

Post by adjkant »

I'm quickly reminded of Photoshop's "History" window and how it was one of my first adds to the standard environment setup to make it visually prominent in the top right of the workspace. You could quickly click up/down it and view the steps, but the functionality is in the end the same as undo/redo, where you lose the others once you make a change after walking backwards.

I can't imagine it would be too crazy for IDE's to begin to add the same, per file at first but maybe also per project and then with saving some of those trees.

Re: Why is it so hard to see code from 5 minutes ago?

#23

Post by Guthur »

stephen272 wrote: post #6

For anyone that uses emacs, there is an excellent plugin "undo-tree" that solves this problem in a slightly different way. Everytime you undo a series of actions and then perform a new action, it creates a branch in the "tree". You can then visualize the tree and move through it quickly your entire buffer history.

I immediately thought of this, it is so good, like a source control-lite.

Re: Why is it so hard to see code from 5 minutes ago?

#24

Post by kleer001 »

stephen272 wrote: post #6

For anyone that uses emacs, there is an excellent plugin "undo-tree" that solves this problem in a slightly different way. Everytime you undo a series of actions and then perform a new action, it creates a branch in the "tree". You can then visualize the tree and move through it quickly your entire buffer history.

Newb emacs user here. Heavily reliant on spacemacs and tutorials and copy-paste, but I use it often.

The undo-tree terrifies me.

Re: Why is it so hard to see code from 5 minutes ago?

#25

Post by justinnhli »

jolmg wrote: post #16

> Why is it so hard to see code from 5 minutes ago while in the middle of a change? In vim you can do: :earlier 5m to see the code you had 5 minutes ago. > (1) If you go to a prior state and then make a new change, you can no longer redo and all those changes are lost. Vim makes a tree, so that doesn't happen with it. When you undo and make a new change, you're just making a new branch. u/Ctrl-r goes from leaf to tru…

> > (3) There is no visual indicator of where you are are in your undo/redo history.

> There might be plugins that somehow present this info in the interface.

The undotree vim plugin [1] does this, and gives both the file at the time as well as a diff of what changed.

[1]: https://github.com/mbbill/undotree

Re: Why is it so hard to see code from 5 minutes ago?

#27

Post by enobrev »

nexthash wrote: post #19
jolmg wrote: post #16

> Why is it so hard to see code from 5 minutes ago while in the middle of a change? In vim you can do: :earlier 5m to see the code you had 5 minutes ago. > (1) If you go to a prior state and then make a new change, you can no longer redo and all those changes are lost. Vim makes a tree, so that doesn't happen with it. When you undo and make a new change, you're just making a new branch. u/Ctrl-r goes from leaf to tru…

This is excellent... for Vim users. A lot of developers either are not willing or haven't gotten around to learning the complexities of Vim, and use other IDEs like JetBrains or Eclipse. This workflow won't work for them.

JetBrains' various apps can do this as well with a feature called "Show Local History". I'm not sure where it is in the menus but you can hit shift twice and type it in.

It automatically commits after every change since the IDE was opened, and can easily be diffed and reverted as needed. Reverting saves another entry, so you can revert back to the future as well.

Re: Why is it so hard to see code from 5 minutes ago?

#28

Post by artificial »

adjkant wrote: post #21

I'm quickly reminded of Photoshop's "History" window and how it was one of my first adds to the standard environment setup to make it visually prominent in the top right of the workspace. You could quickly click up/down it and view the steps, but the functionality is in the end the same as undo/redo, where you lose the others once you make a change after walking backwards. I can't imagine it would be too crazy for ID…

The actions can be embedded in the files as well. Pretty handy if you need to recreate something that's not been touched in a year.

Re: Why is it so hard to see code from 5 minutes ago?

#29

Post by thitcanh »

Does anyone know if there’s a good way to do this in VS Code? I often hold cmd-z until I get to some version and copy code from it. Ideally I’d like to have a separate window where I can see a previous version without affecting the current file/view.

Before anyone comments, git doesn’t cut it for this because no one commits after every -+1

Re: Why is it so hard to see code from 5 minutes ago?

#30

Post by 83457 »

I remember using eclipse and a plugin for cfml years ago. If I help undo for a couple seconds to see old version and then redo for a couple seconds there was a 50/50 chance it would corrupt the code. If you haven't saved your latest changes or accidentally saving the corrupt code and have to compare to repo it gets old quick. Switched to Sublime.
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