Local File History Possibilities in Emacs
Wouter Groeneveld - https://brainbaking.com, wouter@brainbaking.com
The following image shows where the talk is in the schedule for Sun 2026-12-13. Solid lines show talks with Q&A via BigBlueButton. Dashed lines show talks with Q&A via IRC or Etherpad.
Format: 12-min talk ; Q&A: BigBlueButton conference room https://media.emacsconf.org/2026/current/bbb-local.html
Etherpad: https://pad.emacsconf.org/2026-local
Discuss on IRC: #emacsconf
Status: Ready to stream
Sunday, Dec 13 2026, ~7:40 AM - 7:55 AM MST (US/Mountain)
Sunday, Dec 13 2026, ~6:40 AM - 6:55 AM PST (US/Pacific)
Sunday, Dec 13 2026, ~2:40 PM - 2:55 PM UTC
Sunday, Dec 13 2026, ~3:40 PM - 3:55 PM CET (Europe/Paris)
Sunday, Dec 13 2026, ~4:40 PM - 4:55 PM EET (Europe/Athens)
Sunday, Dec 13 2026, ~8:10 PM - 8:25 PM IST (Asia/Kolkata)
Sunday, Dec 13 2026, ~10:40 PM - 10:55 PM +08 (Asia/Singapore)
Sunday, Dec 13 2026, ~11:40 PM - 11:55 PM JST (Asia/Tokyo)
Description
Emacs offers a myriad of ways to keep track of previous versions of your document: through tilde-like backup files, auto-save files, and of course the extensive built-in undo history system. Navigating that can be a chore unless you install something like vundo to visualize the undo tree. But with a huge undo-limit, even vundo can become unwieldy. What if we can conjure up a way to diff between the current document and the state it was in ten or twenty minutes ago, not unlike IntelliJ's local history system? Using a combination of Consult (preview) and diff-buff, that can be easily done! In this lightning talk, we'll explore how to quickly browse through diff history and roll back using built-in Emacs tooling.
Questions or comments? Please e-mail wouter@brainbaking.com