gnu-emacs@gentoo.org
Gentoo GNU Emacs project
Emacs has a powerful undo system. Unlike the standard undo/redo system in
most software, it allows you to recover *any* past state of a buffer
(whereas the standard undo/redo system can lose past states as soon as you
redo). However, this power comes at a price: many people find Emacs' undo
system confusing and difficult to use, spawning a number of packages that
replace it with the less powerful but more intuitive undo/redo system.
Both the loss of data with standard undo/redo, and the confusion of Emacs'
undo, stem from trying to treat undo history as a linear sequence of
changes. It's not. The `undo-tree-mode' provided by this package replaces
Emacs' undo system with a system that treats undo history as what it is: a
branching tree of changes. This simple idea allows the more intuitive
behaviour of the standard undo/redo system to be combined with the power of
never losing any history. An added side bonus is that undo history can in
some cases be stored more efficiently, allowing more changes to accumulate
before Emacs starts discarding history.
The only downside to this more advanced yet simpler undo system is that it
was inspired by Vim. But, after all, most successful religions steal the
best ideas from their competitors!
tsc25/undo-tree