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Ch 10. Undo
Undo is an essential feature in any modern software. Vim's undo system is not only capable of undoing and redoing mistakes, but allows you to manipulate and retrieve text across time. In this chapter, you will learn how to undo and redo your text, navigate an undo branch, persist undo, and travel through time.
Undo, Redo, And UNDO
To perform a basic undo, you can use u or run :undo.
If you have this text:
one
Add another text:
one
two
If you do u, Vim undoes the text "two".
How does Vim know how much to undo? Vim undoes a single "change" at a time, similar to a dot command's change (unlike the dot command, command-line commands also count as change).
To redo the last change, run Ctrl-r or :redo. After you undo the text above to remove "two", you can run Ctrl-r to get the removed text back.
Vim also has UNDO that you can run with U. It undoes all latest changes.
How is U different from u? First, U removes all the changes on the latest changed line, while u only removes one change at a time. Second, while doing u does not count as a change, doing U counts as a change.
Back to this example:
one
two
Change the second line with "three" (ciwthree<esc>):
one
three
Change the second line again and replace it with "four" (ciwfour<esc>):
one
four
If you press u, you will see "three". If you press u again, you'll see "two".
However, if instead of pressing u when you still had the text "four", you had pressed U, you will see:
one
U bypasses all the intermediary changes and goes to the original state when you started (the empty line below the text "one"). In addition, since UNDO actually creates a new change in Vim, you can UNDO your UNDO. U followed by U will undo itself. You can press U, then U, then U, forever, and you will see the same two texts toggled back and forth.
I personally do not use U because it is hard to remember the original state (I seldom ever need it). The most I have ever used U is when I accidentally pressed Shift-u.
Vim sets a maximum number of how many times you can undo in undolevels option variable. You can check it with :echo &undolevels. I have mine set to be 1000. To change yours to 1000, run :set undolevels=1000. Feel free to set it to any number you like.
Breaking The Blocks
I mentioned earlier that u undoes a single "change" similar to the dot command's change. Any text entered between entering the insert mode and exiting is counted as a change.
If you do ione two three<esc> then press u, Vim removes the entire "one two three" text because it is considered a change. This would have been acceptable if you have a short text, but what if you have written several paragraphs under one insert mode session without exiting and later you realized you made a mistake? If you press u, everything you had written would be removed. Wouldn't it be useful if you can press u to remove only a section of your text?
Luckily, you can break the undo blocks. When you are typing in insert mode, pressing Ctrl-g u creates an undo breakpoint. For example, if you do ione <Ctrl-g u>two <Ctrl-g u>three<esc>, then press u, you will only lose the text "three". Press u one more time to remove "two". When you write a long text, use Ctrl-g u strategically. The end of each sentence, between two paragraphs, or after each line of code are good locations to add undo breakpoints to make it easier to undo your mistakes if you ever make one.
It is also useful to create an undo breakpoint when deleting chunks in insert mode with Ctrl-w (delete the word before the cursor) and Ctrl-u (delete all text before the cursor). A friend suggested to use the following mappings:
inoremap <c-u> <c-g>u<c-u>
inoremap <c-w> <c-g>u<c-w>
With these, you can easily recover the deleted texts.
Undo Tree
Vim stores every change ever written in an undo tree. If you start a new empty file:
Add a new text:
one
Add a new text:
one
two
Undo once:
one
Add a different text:
one
three
Undo again:
one
And add another different text:
one
four
Now if you undo, you will lose the text "four" you just added:
one
If you undo one more time:
You will lose the text "one". In most text editor, getting the texts "two" and "three" back would have been impossible, but not with Vim. Run g+, you'll get your text "one" back:
one
Type g+ again and you will see an old friend:
one
two
Let's keep going. Press g+ again:
one
three
Press g+ one more time:
one
four
In Vim, every time you press u and then make a different change, Vim stores the previous state's text by creating an "undo branch". In this example, after you typed "two", then pressed u, then typed "three", you created an undo leaf branch that stores the state containing the text "two". At that moment, the undo tree contained at least two leaf nodes: the main node containing the text "three" (most recent) and the undo branch node containing the text "two". If you had done another undo and typed the text "four", you now have at least three nodes: a main node containing the text "four" and two nodes containing the texts "three" and "two".
To traverse each node in the undo tree, you can use g+ to go to a newer state and g- to go to an older state. The difference between u, Ctrl-r, g+, and g- is that both u and Ctrl-r traverse only the main nodes in undo tree while g+ and g- traverse all nodes in the undo tree.
Undo tree is not easy to visualize. I find vim-mundo plugin to be very useful to help visualize Vim's undo tree. Give it some time to play around with it.
Persistent Undo
If you start Vim, open a new file, and immediately press u, Vim will probably display "Already at oldest change" warning. Vim can preserve your undo history with an undo file with :wundo.
Create a file mynumbers.txt. Type:
one
Then type another line (make sure you either exit insert mode first or create an undo block):
one
two
Type another line:
one
two
three
Now create your undo file. The syntax is :wundo myundofile. If you need to overwrite an existing undo file, you can add ! after wundo.
:wundo! mynumbers.undo
Then exit Vim.
By now you should have mynumbers.txt and mynumbers.undo files in your directory. Open up mynumbers.txt again and try pressing u. You can't. You haven't made any changes since you opened the file. Now load your undo history by reading the undo file with :rundo:
:rundo mynumbers.undo
Now if you press u, Vim removes "three". Press u again to remove "two". It is like you never even closed Vim!
If you want to have an automatic undo persistence, one way to do it is by adding these lines in your vimrc:
set undodir=~/.vim/undo_dir
set undofile
I think it's better to put all the undofiles in one centralized directory, in this case, inside the ~/.vim directory. The name undo_dir is arbitrary. set undofile tells Vim to turn on undofile feature because it is off by default. Now whenever you save, Vim automatically creates and updates the relevant file inside the undo_dir directory (make sure that you create the actual undo_dir directory inside ~/.vim directory before running this).
Time Travel
Who says that time travel doesn't exist? Vim can travel to a text state in the past with :earlier command-line command.
If you have this text:
one
Then later you write another line:
one
two
If you had typed "two" less than ten seconds ago, you can go back to the state where "two" didn't exist ten seconds ago with:
:earlier 10s
You can use :undolist to see when the last change was made. :earlier also accepts minutes (m), hours (h), and days (d) as arguments.
:earlier 10s go to the state 10 seconds before
:earlier 10m go to the state 10 minutes before
:earlier 10h go to the state 10 hours before
:earlier 10d go to the state 10 days before
In addition, it also accepts a regular count as argument to tell Vim to go to the older state count times. For example, if you do :earlier 2, Vim will go back to an older text state two changes ago. It is the same as doing g- twice. Lastly, you can also tell :earlier to go to the older text state 10 saves ago with :earlier 10f.
The same set of arguments work with :earlier counterpart: :later.
:later 10s go to the state 10 seconds later
:later 10m go to the state 10 minutes later
:later 10h go to the state 10 hours later
:later 10d go to the state 10 days later
:later 10 go to the newer state 10 times
:later 10f go to the state 10 saves later
Learn Undo The Smart Way
u and Ctrl-r are two indispensable Vim commands. Learn them first. I do not use UNDO in my workflow, however I think it's good to be aware that it exists. Next, learn how to use :earlier and :later using the time arguments first. After that, take your time to understand the undo tree. The vim-mundo plugin helped me a lot. Type along the texts in this chapter and check the undo tree as you make each change. Once you grasp it, you will never see undo system the same way again.
Prior to this chapter, you learned how to find any text in a project space, with undo, you can now find any text in a time dimension. You are now able to search for any text by its location and time written. You have achieved Vim-omnipresence.