Turn Vim's multiple undo history into git commits?

Question

When refactoring I sometimes do too much at once—all little steps, but I forget to commit after each little change.

Of course in many cases a commit after each change would be too much, but if each individual change were initially made as a separate commit, it would be very easy to git rebase them to combine them into logical, atomic changes.

Is there a way to convert each point in Vim's multiple undo history into a separate git commit?

Answer 1

Here's a quick and dirty function that does what you request:

function! UndoCommits(steps)
    for i in range(a:steps)
        undo
    endfor

    for i in range(a:steps)
        write
        execute printf('!silent git commit -am "%s"', "undo-commit" . i)
        redo
    endfor
    write
    execute printf('!silent git commit -am "%s"', "final-undo-commit")
    redraw!
endfunction

Call with :call UndoCommits({N}) where {N} is the number of undo steps back you want to go.

The function simply undoes the requested number of times, and then redoes the changes one at a time, making a commit between each change.

Personally, I think I'd just do this manually — I guess a compromise might be to create a mapping that just performs the save-and-commit, and then run this mapping by hand at the relevant parts of the undolist.

Answer 2

I would recommend one of the undo tree visualizer plugins:

• undotree
• Gundo

With them, you can easily revisit previous editing states. You can them (temporarily) restore them (one by one, starting with the oldest relevant), and git commit them, until you arrive back at the original.

Answer 3

Building upon Rich's solution, this one timestamps each commit:

function! UndoCommits()
    let steps = undotree()['seq_last']
    for i in range(steps)
        earlier
    endfor
    for i in range(steps)
    write
        execute printf('!git commit -am "%s" --date=%d &>/dev/null', "undo-commit" . i, undotree()['time_cur'])
        later
    endfor
    write
    execute printf('!git commit -am "final-undo-commit" --date=%d &>/dev/null', undotree()['time_cur'])
    redraw!
endfunction

Usage: :call UndoCommits(). It will make git commits starting from the current position in the undo tree all the way back to the oldest revision.