In CoCalc, one of the foundational ideas is that it should be very easy to see code and Jupyter notebooks from 5 minutes ago. Hence every editor in CoCalc includes a TimeTravel button, which you click on to get a side-by-side view of your file (or notebook) and a slider that lets you go back and forth in time at high resolution. I designed CoCalc this way because when I taught data science classes, I would walk around a classroom while the students were doing an in-class exercise and they would often say to me "I had this part figured out 5 minutes ago, but I messed it up." Some people (including me!) who get used to working this way get very addicted to it, and can hardly imagine working any other way. This is vastly superior to depending on undo/redo, and I use it all the time when doing deep coding projects. It's also useful for collaboration, since it makes it easier to figure out what somebody else did with a file or notebook.
Why is it so hard to see code from 5 minutes ago?
191–200 of 424 posts
Re: Why is it so hard to see code from 5 minutes ago?
#192Sad to see so much judgement in this thread from developers who can't fathom why others would need this. "Sounds like trial an error." "Develop a better memory." Programming is not black and white, there is no right or wrong way to do it. OP discovered a problem they had and wrote a solution for it, believing that others might need to solve the same problem. Clearly they were correct based on plenty of others chiming…
> the wrong way is not constructive.
Well, open minded people can try other ways. Mine is sitting back and thinking instead of racing the keyboard to try out stuff until it works. Both ways (as I compare to my exclusively younger colleagues) reap results in about the same timespan, but I hardly type more than the actual code I need to type while my colleagues write and delete books ('iterate fast') in that time. It both works, but I have several converts who now work like me and actually enjoy it more (not to mention far less chance of RSI).
Whatever works for you I would say.
What is a bad thing though is that it also has to do with the pressure put by WFH in some companies and sites like Upwork => a lot of 'managers' (and sorry, I cannot say anything positive about these people, but their number increased rapidly during Covid in my experience) measure productivity of an employee by keystrokes, screen changes and # of commits. Even though I finish more tasks in a day than most of my colleagues in our projects, according to those metrics, especially keystrokes and screen changes, it looks like I'm doing 'nothing'. Whatever.
Re: Why is it so hard to see code from 5 minutes ago?
#193Jetbrains IDEs have a local history feature that provides snapshots with diffs and allows partial rollbacks. I only use it when experimenting with different approaches. Mostly I only use the "Local Changes" tab in the Git panel that shows the diff compared to the last commit, or "Compare with branch" to see the overall changes relative to the base branch.
this!
Indeed, JetBrains IntelliJIDEA had this feature for decades, I use it very often. It’s just a lifesaver.
Re: Why is it so hard to see code from 5 minutes ago?
#194wow, so my assumptions that coders dont design and draft solutions, but type in furiosly code to make it work where true. i recently begin to believe the teaching how to create software is fundamentaly flawed. now i have more evidence. wow.
Re: Why is it so hard to see code from 5 minutes ago?
#195In Sublime Text I actually use a quick Undo-then-Redo to navigate , of all things. I'll be typing some code and realise I need to check whether the imports at the top of the file are correct. So I'll Cmd+Up (go to the top of the file) and see that yes, they are correct. Now I have to get back to where I was. A quick Cmd+Z,Cmd+Shift+Z does the trick - Undo (takes me back to the code I was editing, and undoes some of i…
There is a navigational back command, that moves your cursor back in time, just like a webbrowsers back button.
cmd+-, if I remember correctly.
Re: Why is it so hard to see code from 5 minutes ago?
#196When making changes to a block of code or block of text, I frequently just comment out the code and rewrite it anew. I might copy-paste existing code (just to avoid stupid transcription errors). If its too large to see both what I'm writing, and the old code, at the same time, I just use two windows on the same file. This is relevant to writing fiction or non-fiction as well. For example, I didn't like this, so I com…
Shouldn't it be "had he looked."? Also the second rendition makes doesn't include what the rest of the joggers are doing, yet the first one does. Not sure if intentional. At first I gasped at your practice, because I never do that, but I see the point now. Mastery of language.
> Also the second rendition makes doesn't include what the rest of the joggers are doing ...
Something is amiss here.
Re: Why is it so hard to see code from 5 minutes ago?
#197My school’s JS IDE [1](“JavaScript without the bad parts”) has a history feature that is just a scrolling list of thumbnails of the code at every change. The IDE doesn’t have many features overall, but the history is actually very nice and natural and feels like it should be standard in any IDE.
Re: Why is it so hard to see code from 5 minutes ago?
#198Auto History for Visual Studio is excellent for this use case.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/auto-history-ext...
Re: Why is it so hard to see code from 5 minutes ago?
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do the same - both commenting out and viewing the file in parallel at different spots - vim vertical splits are great for that. In fact, one of my colleagues remarked that he never thought to view the same file alongside itself when he saw me do that when we were pairing.
As an aside, I think I wouldn't mind if a programming language would include two commenting syntaxes, one for ordinary comments, and another for commenting out. These are two very different use-cases, and distinguishing them syntactically might facilitate certain kinds of work-flows.
In C, you can wrap the 'commented' code with #if 0 ... #endif
Re: Why is it so hard to see code from 5 minutes ago?
#200> 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…
> Are there really editors where adding actions that aren't changes make sense? Adobe Photoshop is one. Selection changes don't modify the document at all, but they are part of the undo stack. That's because selecting a part of an image isn't as trivial as selecting text. Sometimes I wish the current selection could be automatically saved in the file too so you could start where you left off if you were halfway throu…
I don’t know about Photoshop, but the selection is part of the document in GIMP.