Use Local History to Avoid Disaster
Use the IDE's built-in history facility to recover changes when VCS can't help you.
Movies aren't the only things with time machines.
You mistakenly made a big change or deleted a file, and either you aren't under version control or the change was since your last commit. Local History to the rescue.
This is the "Oh my goodness you saved my sanity" tip.
Sometimes you are in a project that's isn't yet under version control. Or, you've done a lot of work since your last commit.
Then, disaster strikes...you make a big change, or delete a chunk of code,
and Undo
is too far away (too much has been typed in) to help.
Or worse, you deleted a file. Oh, that sinking feeling.
Local History
to the rescue. Our IDEs have a built-in facility that tracks
revisions for all IDE-initiated changes. On a file, Show History
brings up
a listing of changes on the left. On the right, a diff for the selected
change compared to the current file. You can apply parts of the diff or
right-click on the change to "revert" the current contents to the contents
at that revision.
If you selected a directory and opened Show History
, it shows file changes,
including deletions and can thus revert a delete by right-clicking on the
change that did the delete.
By default changes are retained for 5 days, but this is configurable.
Local History
has more features, such as applying labels to simulate
branches and generating patches. It isn't a replacement for a VCS, but it is
very helpful when disaster strikes.