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Comment by w4tson | Hacker News Reader

I did this yesterday. However IntelliJ had my back. It's History feature has saved my bacon on more than one occasion.

One time I was able to go back weeks to fetch some code I'd long since deleted and was nowhere to be found in git.

I have this in my .vimrc which serves a similar purpose:

    " persist undo history to file / across sessions
    set undofile
    set undodir=$HOME/.vimundo
    " max out history length
    set history=9999
    set undoleves=9999999999
    set undoreload=10000

(Don't forget to mkdir "$HOME/.vimundo".)

Combine that with https://github.com/mbbill/undotree and you can easily walk the entire history of every file you edit.

The equivalent emacs code is here: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/BackupDirectory

That undotree plugin looks sweet! Do I understand correctly that if I do N undos, then fat-finger an edit instead of a yank, I can still get back to where I was before the N undos? This would solve my only big gripe with vim's undo.

(Well, the other big gripe is that when I'm forced to use a program with crippled undo, e.g. any Microsoft product ever, I'm frustrated up the wall. The worst-in-class award goes to Word with Endnote, where many Endnote commands wipe your entire undo history. How people can use that on a permanent basis is beyond me.)

Is it actually `undoleves` or is that a typo?

That should be `undolevels`, yes. Unfortunately I can't edit it now.

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