codemkin VS klonk

Oh hey, I've built this! My version would watch code files and snapshot a diff every few seconds. It took a little work to tweak the constants to keep the watching performant, but it was super neat being able to replay code. The main problem I faced was that changes often occur in different places in the file, so the history replaying jumps around a lot. With some proper editor integration, I could see it being pretty useful.

My version is super incomplete because I kind of lost steam when I couldn't figure out a really great reason why someone should use this, but hey, maybe it's worth another try: https://github.com/nicholaslyang/codemkin

While surfing the web I came across this blog post: Resolving the Great Undo-Redo Quandary.

Resolving the Great Undo-Redo Quandary\ (31 comments)

My goofy lil' homemade editor does it this way: If you go back in the past and change it, the future becomes the past. This might sound confusing, but effectively it means that the undo stack contains the actual history of "what happened". This means you can hop to any past or future state linearly with undo & redo alone. I just find this easier than navigating tree GUIs and things that aren't worth the trouble to me. It can still lead to a bit of mental gymnastics in extreme cases.

https://github.com/zaboople/klonk

Note that in theory this can cause an exponential growth of the undo/redo stacks because it makes an upside-down copy of the future when you change the past; but in practice it's never been an issue.

I was thinking of adding a feature to navigate back to "last change-the-past", which wouldn't be hard.

It at least makes more sense than most science fiction time-travel plots...