[TxMt] [POLL] Infinite UNDOs / Transparent History management?

[Thomas Aylott (subtleGradient)]

Ahoy me TextMateys,
	I just had a kindof a neat idea.

TextMateHistoryManagement

Currently, when you do a thousand changes in textmate and then close  
your document, all your changes are totally lost :(

What if every time you saved your document, I caught that action,  
backed up your original version and the new one and then archived it  
away in a magical forrest for safekeeping. Then when you open that  
document up again you have the option to undo every previous save  
you've ever made to the document? And you can even see how many  
changes were made every time you saved with a timestamp and a full  
diff and all kinds of crazy stuff?

I know tons of people use some kind of SCM like subversion or  
mercurial or something, but you normally only commit working changes  
and projects that you're working on. Instead, this  
TextMateHistoryManagement  would keep track of every single change you  
make to every single document you ever save, good changes or bad ones,  
who cares, just everything.

Personally, I think this would be stinking awesome to the power of  
infinity -1 squared! (aka, it'd be nifty)

So, as far as UI goes…

I want a new history to be saved every time I save the document.
I want to have a nice GUI palette like photoshop to see a list of  
changes.
	That list shows the filename, hide-able full file path, timestamp and  
the number of lines added, removed or changed in that version.
There should be a hide-able diff drawer or area with a tabbed safari- 
esque view with tabs for each diff available. Diff that version to  
it's parent, the selected items to eachother, or the selected item  
with your open version.

There are some obvious technical hurdles to leap, but it's all totally  
doable. The purpose of this poll is to see if anyone would be  
interested in this from a fronend user interface level. I already know  
how I'm likely going to actually build this thing, and we can talk  
more about that later.

What I'm most interested in is workflow.
I'd like us all to come up with the best and most genericly usable  
workflow for everyone. Maybe some advanced stuff for the nerds, but I  
want this as mostly a noob feature and for people who don't want to  
have to care about version control or whatever.

For example, with the implementation that I just suggested, you could  
do this…

You're working on a version of some random webpage, then someone  
emails you a changed version. You could just replace your current file  
with that one and open it up and check your history palette to see the  
changes. (assuming you had opened and saved the original file in  
textmate at some point)

You'd never had to install or configure or set up anything. It should  
all just work™

Thoughts?

	thomas Aylott — subtleGradient — CrazyEgg — bundleForge

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