Undo and Recovery

Undo, history and recovery

Undo and redo

Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Y, per document. Each tab has its own history and they do not interfere. Ctrl+Shift+Z redoes as well.

Undo entries are grouped the way you would expect: a run of typing is one entry rather than one per character, and Replace All is one entry rather than one per replacement.

An operation on the whole document can be undone until you type. Replace All and the line operations in the Edit menu -- the two Sort Lines, Remove Duplicate Lines, Reverse Lines and Trim Trailing Whitespace -- each rewrite the document as one entry, and Ctrl+Z puts it back. In the default surface the text box keeps the history of your typing and the program keeps the history of those operations, so once you type after one, Ctrl+Z undoes the typing and then stops: the operation before it can no longer be undone. Under --editor-view there is one history, and everything undoes in order.

A no-op does not create an undo entry. Choosing the encoding a document already has, or replacing text with itself, leaves the history alone -- so Ctrl+Z after one of those undoes the last thing you actually did, rather than appearing to do nothing.

Checkpoints

Note > Recovery lists checkpoints of the current document. Restoring one brings back its text and its encoding and line ending, which is the part worth knowing: a checkpoint is a whole document rather than a string, so restoring one cannot silently convert CRLF to LF.

The recovery journal

While a document has unsaved changes, the product keeps a journal so the work survives the program stopping without being able to ask you anything -- a crash, a power cut, a kill.

On the next launch you are asked what to do with it, and there are three answers:

	What happens
Restore	The work opens as unsaved changes, exactly as you left it, and you decide where it goes. Nothing is written over anything
Discard	The work is deleted. This is the only answer to the question that deletes it; the other thing that does is turning on Privacy Mode, which is what Privacy Mode is for
Not Now	The work stays where it is and you are asked again next time. Escape, and closing the window with the question still up, mean the same

A question you did not answer never costs you the work (ADR-0084). That was not always true: on a Linux desktop without zenity, the question could not be drawn at all and was answered discard on your behalf.

Closing a document with Don't Save deletes its journal too. Otherwise the next launch would offer to recover work you had just chosen to throw away.

	Windows	Linux
Journals	%LOCALAPPDATA%\bachelorpad\state\recovery\	$XDG_STATE_HOME/bachelorpad/recovery/, else ~/.local/state/bachelorpad/recovery/

Each journal is a small JSON file naming the document it belongs to. An Untitled buffer has no path, so its journal names none -- which matters if you ever go looking, because such a file matches no filter you might write. The file names begin with a tag for the run that wrote them, so two runs of the program -- one after a crash, or two open at once -- never write over, or tidy away, each other's work. A window that is still open is not offered to another: opening a second window while the first has unsaved changes does not ask you to recover them, because they are not lost. Each run holds a .lock file beside its journals for as long as it is running, and the operating system lets go of it when the run ends, however it ends.

If the file changed after the crash, Restore still brings your work back, but the status bar says the file changed on disk and Save asks before writing over it.

On Linux the journal folder and its files are readable by you alone.

Whether a journal is written at all is a privacy setting. It is one of the two axes the profile model governs; see Privacy. A profile that writes no journal means unsaved work does not survive a crash, and that is the trade being made rather than a defect.

What is not kept

No clipboard history. It existed and was removed (ADR-0061).

No open-tab session. Starting the program gives you an empty document, not what you had open last time. Open Recent is what remembers.

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