Hacker News Reader

Comment by indexerror | Hacker News Reader

Jetbrains 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.

View on HN

Local history saved my sorry butt yesterday when I thought I lost all my files due to a git-related accident. But Local History still had all my changes and restored my files.

Unclear why this isn't baked into the OS nowadays. It's not like we don't have enough disk space ;)

I just saw something similar on Twitter[1]: a script that takes a ZFS snapshot after every command. This lets you jump back to the state of the whole filesystem after every single command that you ran, giving you a sort of global history.

I figure you could adapt that to something a bit more restrained that you could use on an ongoing basis to have a "Local History"-style feature for your whole OS :).

[1]: https://twitter.com/grhmc/status/1362222849662935041

That looks amazing. I've used NetApp NFS filesystems that provided user level snapshots, where it automatically created snapshots of files. It wasn't after every command, but at regular intervals. You could access the files under `.snapshot` directory.

Searching now, it looks like this is part of NetApp ONTAP, and managed by a snapshot policy.

VSCode also has a local history plugin. One of my default installs https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=xyz.loca...

Thanks for sharing this. Does it have a draggable slider? Or ability to "Play" through changes?

I have the feeling JetBrains do not understand how important this feature is for some developers. It does not have a shortcut and recently got buried in the File menu, almost as if they are ashamed of it. I am using it all the time and life would be much harder without it.

In NetBeans there is two big buttons on top of every file view. Source and History. Very easy to get to and has been used a lot :-)

I came here to write this comment. I use this feature often and, like the sibling comment, it has saved my butt a ton! I love JetBrains IDE with Vim bindings

this! Indeed, JetBrains IntelliJIDEA had this feature for decades, I use it very often. It’s just a lifesaver.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com