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Local File History Possibilities in Emacs

Wouter Groeneveld - https://brainbaking.com, wouter@brainbaking.com

Format: 10-min talk ; Q&A: BigBlueButton conference room Etherpad: https://pad.emacsconf.org/2026-local
Etherpad: https://pad.emacsconf.org/2026-local
Status: Waiting for video from speaker

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

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Back to the talks Previous by track: My Space Cadet Deck - an Android Stream Deck replacement with deep Emacs integration Next by track: Sunday opening remarks Track: General