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

[Alain O'Dea]

I like this idea a lot. Please implement it (and someone please fix
the brutal character-by-character undo).

Eclipse (http://www.eclipse.org/) does a compromise here by storing
entries for every file you are editing in something it calls Local
History. It lets you diff/merge against the Local History or load the
content of any previous entry. You don't get the entire undo/redo
history, but you do get major changes that occurred.

I strongly recommend looking at the design used by Eclipse for this.

On 8/15/07, Thomas Aylott (subtleGradient) <oblivious at subtlegradient.com> wrote:
>  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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