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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

Interesting commentary. I do think this is a little harsh on the poor Emacs undo system.

I can't really push back on the idea that Emacs' undo system is excessively confusing, because I use Emacs and I don't understand it. I usually save text in a second buffer if I think I'll need it later.

But the solution should be to improve the UI rather than remove functionality. Consider what magit did to a similar problem in git - git is powerful with a weirdly crippled CLI. Magit adds a great ... Emacs User Interface? EUI? and all is well.

There is a probably a similar solution to the Emacs Undo problem.

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Given your current situation, undo-tree-visualize will change your life.

wow. is there something like this but for a whole project ?

I think that something is "git" :)

nope. what i mean is doing undo operations on a project as opposed to a buffer. lets say you have 3 buffers open and you edit buffer 1 (i), then you edit buffer 3 (ii), then you edit buffer 2 (iii), and then back to buffer 3 and you edit it some more (iv). finally you want to do project-undo from this point in buffer 3. the undo sequence then goes like this:

(iv) - (iii) - (ii) - (i)

Absolutely not. In typical Emacs fashion they took a serious complaint, fixed it and then went on to overdo it, making it unusable overkill and slow. One step redo would have been enough.

Just add undo-tree and blow everyone's mind :)

> I usually save text in a second buffer if I think I'll need it later.

I use the kill ring for this.

Doesn't the kill ring also behave similarly. That if you move through the kill ring and stop, next time it will start from that point, rather than the latest killed text?

I always get confused if I use too much of it.

I think the default M-y does that and it's confusing. helm-show-kill-ring or counsel-yank-pop makes this much more manageable kind of like how undo-tree makes undoing simpler.

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