Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Resolving the great undo-redo quandary

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 247 posts

Re: Resolving the great undo-redo quandary

#141

Post by Avshalom »

jancsika wrote: post #132
Izkata wrote: post #102

Vim has this, it's :earlier and :later https://vimtricks.com/p/vimtrick-time-travel-in-vim/ :earlier 3 – Undo the last 3 changes :earlier 5m – Go back to the state of the file 5 minutes ago :later 2 – After undoing something, redo the next 2 changes :later 1h – Travel forward through the change history 1 hour Vim also stores the tree of changes, but it's a pain to access without plugins.

What a great feature! Is the author of that feature here? If so, I want to know how they could develop such a feature and be so quiet about it. It's like someone baking a birthday cake and then dropping it down an abandoned well. Just imagine how much more productive we'd all be if Vim bros were as loud as the crypto bros over the past decade!

It's at least 16 years old https://github.com/vim/vim/blob/1f4d4de1ba52d0a9f1310e1026d9...

Re: Resolving the great undo-redo quandary

#142

Post by dahart »

dullcrisp wrote: post #128
dahart wrote: post #121

> Second of all, there's no need to include "window shopping" in our recorded history; this is when you undo a ways, take a look around, then skedaddle out of there back to "the present" without changing anything. This is just a matter of moving information back and forth from undo-stack to redo-stack. Usually the whole reason I might undo for a while is to get back part of something I was working on and merge it int…

It doesn’t sound like you have a problem though. Just keep doing what you’re doing.

Hehe, sure, but there are better ways to do this, and it’s a common need. If the best thing we have is hitting undo 45 times to find something, copy it, try not to accidentally type anything and try not to accidentally lose the clipboard, then redo 45 times, then do a bunch of manual editing… now repeat the entire process for every file, when there are several involved… if that’s sufficient, then SVN is sufficient for source control, and we have no need for Git, right? ;)

My real point is that the “Great Undo-Redo Quandary” is broader than what’s in the article, and the solution discussed is incomplete, doesn’t solve a big chunk of the reason people are using undo multiple times.

Re: Resolving the great undo-redo quandary

#143

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

randlet wrote: post #104
_huayra_ wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well if you want to return to Emacs, I can attest as a former long-time vim user that the emulation layers for vim modes in Emacs are fantastic! They're really the only good part of vim, as the configuration language was always a bit less desirable than elisp, imo.

I've tried in past but always found the vim modes to be a bit lacking. My last attempt was probably 6 or 7 years ago though so maybe worth another shot!

I ported my vim configuration to Evil Mode seven years ago and haven’t looked back. Evil Mode is the best done vi emulation layer I’ve seen and I think it even improves on vim in at least one area (the behavior of `I` in visual line mode).

Re: Resolving the great undo-redo quandary

#144

Post by qw »

hamilyon2 wrote: post #109

Intellij enables multifile changes, renames, file moves with multiple files as single operation, as well as reload from disk, which breaks this simple linear history model afaiu. There is also a separate linear time-based local history in case you screw up. How intellij handles this is the best, in my mind, because of simplicity and separate "I screwed up" mode.

"Local history" in IntelliJ has saved me several times. The diff mode is very useful when working on a piece of code and suddenly your tests starts failing and you need to find out what changes you made in the last hour.

Re: Resolving the great undo-redo quandary

#145

Post by omoikane »

Izkata wrote: post #102

Vim has this, it's :earlier and :later https://vimtricks.com/p/vimtrick-time-travel-in-vim/ :earlier 3 – Undo the last 3 changes :earlier 5m – Go back to the state of the file 5 minutes ago :later 2 – After undoing something, redo the next 2 changes :later 1h – Travel forward through the change history 1 hour Vim also stores the tree of changes, but it's a pain to access without plugins.

Came here to look for comments about VIM's `g-` and `g+` feature, was not disappointed :)

Re: Resolving the great undo-redo quandary

#146

Post by bo1024 »

Cool! What about a model based completely on the "history" as a list of states of the document over time?

There is no "undo" or "redo" operation, we only have "browse backward/forward in time".

If you are browsing at a point in the past history, you can just start editing. Then the document state is copied to the end of the history (i.e. the current point in time), followed by your edits, etc.

This removes the 2^n problem. It could be a bit inconvenient if you want to do a lot of tree-like changes, but could also better balance convenience+usability+power.

Post reply on HN