Time Travelling With Vim

I usually work on many projects at a time and as a consequence, I tend to open many files. Having all of my data backed in a VCS saves me the hassle of losing any committed data, but it’s always possible to shoot yourself in the foot by messing up the work tree; and this is where the editor of my choice - the mighty and glorious - vim comes to the rescue. A little know fact - vim is a superhero - and one of vim’s superpowers is time travel - and not just any time travel - time travel on steroids.

Other folks may call it persistent undo, but there’s no fooling us! But being the humble superhero that vim is, you need to tell vim to use time travel.

First create an undodir for vim.

$ mkdir -p ~/.vim/undodir

Next you need to enable persistent undo by including the following lines in your vimrc:

set undofile
set undodir=~/.vim/undodir

And now even if you go on an editing rampage, vim will save the day. The next time, I shall introduce you to vim’s other superpower - the ability to use the multi-verse.