Use Local History to Avoid Disaster

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.