~adeodato/ blog/ entries/ 2008/ 06/ 01/ Not losing stuff when playing undo/redo in Vim

Not losing stuff when playing undo/redo in Vim

Sometimes, when you play with undo and redo and make, inadvertently or not, some changes in the middle, you find yourself unable to get to the state from where you parted, possibly loosing some words, or more.

Since version 7, Vim has a solution to this problem, named “undo branches”. The idea is simple: if you undo a change C, going back to state B, and make a new change D on top of B, instead of C becoming unreachable, it is stored in an undo branch.

Undo branches are navigated with the g- and g+ commands. For documentation:

  :help usr_32.txt
  :help undo.txt