klonk VS vim-mundo

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...

there's also telescope-undo and vim-mundo

I don't always need it, but when I do I find vim-mundo incredibly helpful. Understanding the vim undotree is hard without a visualization and mundo's ability to search my undo chunks makes it easy to revive some previous change that wasn't committed to version control.

Still using mundo here (https://github.com/simnalamburt/vim-mundo)

You mean undo/redo? that's u and . To view undos visually you can use a plugin like [vim-mundo](https://github.com/simnalamburt/vim-mundo

I'm glad you found something that works for you, and I don't mean to dissuade you even if I could, but to me that feels like an antipattern if you only use it for typed text.

Consider that with a text editor like Vim, for example, you can "time travel" [0] through your file's edits, or even have undo branches/trees [1][2] available per file. That saves you the trouble of having to transcribe text from screenshots, and also barely uses any storage space.

Plain text is also highly more portable and more likely to be recoverable in case of drive failure or file corruption.

Additionally, or alternatively, you could try any sort of manual versioning system or background automatic backup solution that keeps versions of files as you work on them.

[0]: https://vimtricks.com/p/vimtrick-time-travel-in-vim/

[1]: https://neovim.io/doc/user/undo.html#undo-tree

[2]: https://github.com/simnalamburt/vim-mundo

mundo undo tree

It's not just minutes either, you can do seconds with s, hours with h, days with d and get this - "writes" with w. You can also just simply go back to an arbitrary n number of buffer states before; but just like writes, that's hard to keep track of mentally and instead you should probably use a proper plugin for that.

I used to use Typora before I got into Neovim and realised that it wasn't free software either. Now I'm quite satisfied with my current setup, which uses: - aerial.nvim for header outline and navigation - run-code.nvim for running code blocks - vim-mundo for persistent undo history traversal (like Mac's time machine) - Prettier for auto-formatting Markdown as well as code blocks to their respective languages

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.

There's a fork called mundo which has an inline diff mode that I'm a big fan of — https://github.com/simnalamburt/vim-mundo