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Comment by linsomniac | Hacker News Reader

Don't forget time-travel undo. If you get into a weird state with the undo tree, and g+/g- aren't helping, you can do ":earlier 5m" to go back to where you were 5 minutes ago, and ":later 30s" to step forward.

Unfortunately, when you're at "now" you can't do ":later 30m" to see the future.

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> you can do ":earlier 5m" to go back to where you were 5 minutes ago

That's crazy! I've used vi/vim/neovim for so long, probably two decades, and I've never heard anything about this feature, yet so many cases this would have been helpful.

Must be hundreds of these features I still don't know about. What's the wildest less-known vim features people sit on and haven't shared with the rest of us yet? :)

If you are using vim in the terminal pressing alt send an escape sequence when followed by another key press. So to go out of insert mode I usually press alt+ one of h/j/k/l

I use this a lot when trying different ways of solving things or debugging.

Just today I was looking into a bug when I started worrying that it might be caused by a fairly recent improvement I made to the feature. I went to the file in question, went back two weeks with ":earlier 14d" then recompiled and confirmed the bug was already present without my change.

I was gonna make a quip that someone should really get on the ":later" feature, but then I realized that the modern LLM craze more or less is that feature.

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