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Sometimes I want to get back and copy some old code that I deleted and use it. For example, I'll do:
:earlier 12h
and then yank the deleted code.
To get back to where I was, I'll issue a command like:
:later 13h
with the time argument for the :later command being longer than the time argument I supplied for the :earlier command.
This works, but it seems like there should be a cleaner way to jump back to the latest version of the code. I can't seem to find a command to do that, though.
As long as you don't write the current buffer, and you probably don't need to if you are just looking back to yank some stuff, you can use :edit! (or simply :e!) to reload the file from disk, thus undoing all those changes.
How about, in Normal mode, 9 9 9 Ctrl+R ?
From :h CTRL-R:
CTRL-R Redo [count] changes which were undone.
If you overshoot it's okay. You can't go past the most recent change. (To the future?)
Of course, you can use any sufficiently high number. 999 is just a quick way to a number likely to do the job. If not add another 9 or two. Just hammer on it until you feel good about it. ;)
:Glogin fugitive to load older revisions of the file, or:Gdiff <revision>to view the differences in vimdiff mode. I would consider that a better practice than:earlier