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Comment by thitcanh | Hacker News Reader

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

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Like an ongoing stream of history where I have a slider I can drag to revert on-the-fly.. That'd be cool. I mean you could easily record and do this, but that doesn't copy-paste well.

EDIT: And of course I read the article after reading the comments.. Haha, VS Code plug-in in 3.. 2..

One thing I think would help this is a dual repo setup with the local dev-only repo automatically committing on save (or if your watch is expensive committing unsaved editor state on pause). The repo could be short lived if you prefer (eg new per baseline repo branch or editing session) or a long lived series of stashes. But its history would be built into the editing experience and separate from the normal version control flow. I don’t think it would necessarily work for everyone but it could certainly fit how I work in exploratory mode without breaking my editing flow.

Yeah that is the simple and very effective solution of this whole problem. If I had to use I would use something like this.

It might not be exactly what you're looking for, but I saw this linked on Twitter recently and have been meaning to try it out, so maybe worth a look?

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Wattenbe...

This solves another problem I had, so I’ll try it, but it’s completely unrelated to edit history.

Don't know if it serves any other purpose than coloring, but if you want to just go back to the last (and next) edit locations, Visual Studio already has a shortcut for that (Ctrl+Shift+'-' / Ctrl+'-')

this looks like it does that https://github.com/zabel-xyz/local-history

not super polished nor is it actively maintained but has promise

Here's the vscode marketplace link for it https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=xyz.loca...

I use it with every project and it works great. Helped me out a bunch of times. Just need to remember to ignore the .history folder from git and other tools.

Commit early, Commit often!

If I have to commit my whole undo history then I’m using git very wrong. I commit (even temporarily) to save progress, but only when it makes sense to so. Sometimes I don’t know whether I’ll need this specific version again in the future.

Git doesn't mandate to only commit useful stuff.

But if there are more people in the team, it will be a great amount of noise they will have to go through before reaching any useful commit. Definitely not recommended.

`commit` doesn't mean `push`. Commit locally, rewrite history with rebase before pushing it to others.

There's a difference between committing to your local tree and pushing it to others. You can always cleanup before pushing.

This is correct, not sure why you’re getting downvotes. Feature branch for WIP makes sense.

That's still way more overhead compared to undo/redo

I take it you didn't read the article so.

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