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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?

#411

Post by Johnyma22 »

ta1234567890 wrote: post #93

Tangential to this. Does anyone know of an app/service like etherpad, but for handwritten notes? Would love to be able to replay notes that I write with the pencil on the iPad. I also feel it would enable a cool way of storytelling in which you can play with the way you write so readers get to experience the text in different ways. Imagine that as you are reading something all of a sudden the letters start getting bi…

https://github.com/lovasoa/whitebophir and it can be embedded in a pad for both text and hand written notes.

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

#412

Post by im3w1l »

b3n wrote: post #402
jolmg wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. It's cool that it's lossless, but doing a lot of undos and redos makes the history quickly unwieldy to navigate. I much prefer vim's tree implementation. I wouldn't say that it's worse than the standard, though. Unwieldy as it may be, I like that I can just keep on pressing C-/ and eventually get to the state I want without risk that I may have lost it because I accidentally made a change after a series of u…

> doing a lot of undos and redos makes the history quickly unwieldy to navigate Are you aware of the `undo-only` (and `undo-redo`) functions? They make it a breeze to navigate even the most complex undo history.

undo-only doesn't have a keybind which makes it inconvient to use many times in a row. You could define one yourself I suppose, but at that point why not just get undo-tree?

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

#413

Post by im3w1l »

jolmg wrote: post #380
im3w1l wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been over a decade since my bad experience so take my words with a grain of salt. Iirc, the issues I had was that I made a huge history of undos-followed-by-redos-followed by-undos-etc etc and the more I navigated my history the more tangled and out of control it became. I think I also had a problem with often accidentally switching from undo to redo mode. Emacs documentation recommends using C-f (forward-charac…

I agree. It's cool that it's lossless, but doing a lot of undos and redos makes the history quickly unwieldy to navigate. I much prefer vim's tree implementation. I wouldn't say that it's worse than the standard, though. Unwieldy as it may be, I like that I can just keep on pressing C-/ and eventually get to the state I want without risk that I may have lost it because I accidentally made a change after a series of u…

The issue I have is that I want to be able to use C-f and C-g and many others without it changing anything about my history.

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

#414

Post by woutr_be »

albertgoeswoof wrote: post #260
WesleyJohnson wrote: post #153

Sad 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…

I actually think this is part of the problem- there is excellent tooling for making programming much, much easier, but many programmers are unaware of how to use them. When I was an undergrad, I wrote code in a text editor without syntax highlighting, I debugged using log statements, and I manually tested every change by running my program manually with different inputs. Of course those are all fixed by pretty basic…

> I actually think this is part of the problem- there is excellent tooling for making programming much, much easier, but many programmers are unaware of how to use them.

Isn’t that just called “experience”? It’s understandable that junior engineers don’t know these tools exists, but most will learn them after a few years.

If you’re curious and interested enough, you’ll wonder if there are better ways to do things. Or talk to more experienced people and ask them how they do things.

I don’t think this is a “problem”, it’s just part of the process of becoming an experienced engineer.

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

#415

Post by Hackbraten »

AlexCoventry wrote: post #122
Hackbraten wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The obvious challenges seem to be managing temp-branch vs. “real” current branch state in a way that doesn't mess up or get messed up by other tools interacting with the repo (including ha sling things like pulls and other inbound changes to your “real” active branch), and generating non-noise automated commit messages. Low-level plumbing commands, if the VCS has them, can help with that, e. g. `git commit-tree`.

Where would you want to use `git commit-tree`?

It’s a convenient shortcut to take an existing commit and append to it a new commit that changes the file tree to any state you want. For example, if you want that new commit to result in the exact same file tree as another existing commit in the same repository, you can tell git commit-tree to make exactly that happen.

It will also just print the new commit hash without moving `HEAD`, which is why it may also be useful in dragonwriter’s use case.

Raymond Chen explains it way better than I do: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20190506-00/?p=10...

List of related blog entries: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20620441

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

#416

Post by DevoidSimo »

londons_explore wrote: post #328
sdevonoes wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do the same. Many people comment about commiting frequently but that doesn't work for me: delete code + commit => I don't see the code anymore and my brain magically forgets about it. I need the quick feedback loop: commented code + uncommented code (all in one screen) => new code is going to look like a mix of both. If I have to use git to see commented code then the feedback loop is broken.

Commiting frequently also has a substantial cost of needing to think of a commit message. If you don't think of a commit message, you'll never be able to find this version again. If you think up a message every 2 minutes, you'll quickly find you spend more time thinking of commit messages than writing code. I wish there was some kind of auto generated commit message. Things like: "Added function xyz()" or "Adjusted c…

What's to stop you doing all these commits locally with uninformative messages, then squashing them when you push/PR with a better message?

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

#417

Post by vagab0nd »

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.

Something I always thought might be useful: I want to select a region of the code, and undo that, while keeping everything else unchanged.

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

#418

Post by gnubison »

jonnycomputer wrote: post #394
throwawayboise wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> one of my colleagues remarked that he never thought to view the same file alongside itself I do this all the time in Emacs, usually to see two parts of the file that normally are too far apart to be visible at the same time. Collapsible sections can do similar, but to me it's quicker, more natural and more flexible to just split the window.

I think this workflow comes particularly naturally in Emacs, since anytime you split the window (e.g. C-x 3) the current buffer sn already duplicated in the new window. You have to change the buffer in the new window if that is what you want. You can do this in your IDEs too (like Pycharm) but the option to do so doesn't exactly leap off the screen at you.

Vim does a similar thing to Emacs here: the `:sp` and `:vs` commands take an optional argument that, if given, loads a file in the new window. Otherwise the new window just contains the same buffer.

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

#419

Post by jawzz »

theaussiestew wrote: post #235
jawzz wrote: post #197

My 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. [1] https://www.ocelot-ide.org/

I'm curious, does it actually use the local machine to compile files? Or is the compilation done on some remote instance?

It’s built off of Stopify[1], which compiles “from JS to JS” and runs on the client side.

[1] https://www.stopify.org/

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

#420

Post by ta1234567890 »

Johnyma22 wrote: post #411
ta1234567890 wrote: post #93

Tangential to this. Does anyone know of an app/service like etherpad, but for handwritten notes? Would love to be able to replay notes that I write with the pencil on the iPad. I also feel it would enable a cool way of storytelling in which you can play with the way you write so readers get to experience the text in different ways. Imagine that as you are reading something all of a sudden the letters start getting bi…

https://github.com/lovasoa/whitebophir and it can be embedded in a pad for both text and hand written notes.

Thank you, looks great. Does it have a replay feature? Didn’t see a reference to it on the readme or the wiki.
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