Is there a way to restore a previous version of file in vim

Question

I had a swp file with old content, to which I restored and wasted much cleaning it. So I would like much such feature.

Jetbrains's IDEs have feature local history:

Which preserve history for specified settings, it looks this:

I would like similar feature in vim, maybe with plugin.

Answer 1

The mbbill/undotree plugin provides you similar feature provided that you have enabled the support for undofiles

see screenshot:

Here is what I have in my .vimrc files to control the support

" Save undo trees in files (such that they are available after vim is closed)
set undofile

" folder to store the undo files (the folder has to be created first)
" Save undo files in the .undo sub-folder (if it exists)
" Otherwise in the ~/vimfiles/undo folder (if it exists)
" It avoid to pollute your local folder
if has('win32')
  if !isdirectory(s:vim_data_folder .. 'undo')
    call mkdir(s:vim_data_folder .. 'undo')
  endif
  exe 'set undodir=' .. '.undo/,' .. s:vim_data_folder_alt .. 'undo/'
endif

if has('unix')
  if !isdirectory($HOME .. '/.vim/undo')
    call mkdir($HOME .. "/.vim/undo", "p", 0700)j
  endif
  set undodir=.undo/,~/.vim/undo/
endif

" Set the number of undo saved:
set undolevels=10000