gundo.vim VS klonk

Using a plugin like undotree (or Gundo, or Mundo) to visualize the edit history is by far the most practical solution to OP's problem, and I'm shocked you're the only person to suggest it.

For those that use vim, gundo.vim visualizes the "undo-tree" and allows you to preview / jump to any revision: https://github.com/sjl/gundo.vim

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...