vim: revert a specific change in the undo history

[ping song]

say I've done 3 changes A, B, C.

but I realized B is a big mistake. A and C is good.

can I just delete change B, but keep A and C?

[Christian Brabandt]

I believe this is not possible. What you can do is, copy the whole
buffer at state C, move back to state A and clear the buffer and paste
the content from State C (effectively creating a new change A->D)

Best,
Christian
--
Spielen ist eine Tätigkeit, die man gar nicht ernst genug nehmen kann.
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[A. S. Budden]

On Tue, 11 Jul 2023, 20:26 Christian Brabandt, <cbl...@256bit.org> wrote:

On Di, 11 Jul 2023, ping song wrote:

> say I've done 3 changes A, B, C.
> but I realized B is a big mistake. A and C is good.
> can I just delete change B, but keep A and C?

I believe this is not possible. What you can do is, copy the whole
buffer at state C, move back to state A and clear the buffer and paste
the content from State C (effectively creating a new change A->D)

An alternative would be to use the history commands to get at each version and either use diff/patch tools or a 3-way merge tool like BeyondCompare to sort it out.

e.g. (untested):

* Open file at State C

* :w statec.txt

* Revert to State B

* :w stateb.txt

* Revert to State A

* :w statea.txt

* diff -u stateb.txt statec.txt > c_changes.diff

* patch -p0 statea.txt < c_changes.diff

(check all of those commands before running as they were off the top of my head!)

[Eike Rathke]

Hi ping,

Not directly; you could save file and use Mundo
https://github.com/simnalamburt/vim-mundo to jump to the diff of B,
write the preview to patchfile, switch to editfile and run patchfile
through
!patch -R % patchfile
and reload the file. A tad cumbersome though..

There's https://github.com/simnalamburt/vim-mundo/issues/20 but never
resolved.

Eike

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