this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2023
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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It sounds confusing, but it's actually really easy to get used and hard to walk away from it. Essentially the undo is just another operation so it can be undone just like everything else, and that's a redo. Imagine the following situation, I wrote a text, but wasn't happy with some part, so I select that part and delete it, now I keep writing but I realised I need some part of what was there, so I undo all of the text that I wrote, select the text I want to copy, and accidentally cut it instead of copy it. In most editors that's it, you're fucked, you just lost your most recent changes, on Emacs undo does not destroy things, it only adds to the sequence. In other words, as a step by step:
Like I said, confusing to understand, but it means that you can't ever shoot yourself in the foot by undoing things.
Emacs's
undo-tree
-- which I mentioned above that I use -- also provides non-destructive undo, same as emacs's base undo. So you can't lose data by undoing things. However, it also uses theundo
andredo
semantics to traverse one branch of the tree, so it works like most other apps as long as you aren't needing to recover data that would normally have been "lost" by performing an undo.There are probably faster ways to do it, but since I rarely need to quickly grab stuff that an undo destroyed, I haven't looked into them.
Do non-undo operation.
Undo it.
Do non-undo operation. At this point, in software packages that lack non-destructive undo, you will have lost the data in #1.
Run
undo-tree-visualize
, onC-x u
by default. A new window will come up displaying the undo history as a tree.You can traverse around the tree. Move to the node immediately before the branch that you abandoned, and use
C-b
andC-f
to switch between branches.Yeah, no.
If 'esc-u' doesn't work, I :q!
,
I will bet that vim has some form of non-destructive undo as well. Might take an add-on package, but generally-speaking, useful behavior in emacs and vim tend to get ported to each other.
googles
Yup.
https://learnvim.irian.to/basics/undo
It sounds like vim+vim-mundo and emacs+undo-tree operate kind of similarly, actually.
EDIT: In fact, this is definitely the case. According to emacswiki, emacs' undo-tree is based on vim's model.
Nice.
you mean
ZQ
Nope! But cool.