Emacs: undo magic

Published 2024-08-08

tag(s): #emacs

Just now, as I was writing the previous post, I deleted the footnote section by mistake. But I only realized a few moments later, when I was about to finish the post and wanted to add a second footnote.

With a lesser editor, I would have been screwed. But Emacs, probably the oldest code running in my computer, released first in the 80s, has the notion of "local undo": select some part of the text, start undoing, and the undo action will apply only to the portion of text highlighted.
In this case, instead of undoing all the paragraph text I had typed, I selected the area where the footnotes were supposed to be, and I got back to the point where the section was present again. Then kept editing.

I always find interesting how many features that we Emacsers take as "normal", are actually quite advanced compared to other, more (allegedly) modern tools...


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