Naughty undo-tree

Mon Nov 10 19:45:12 CET 2014

Titus von der Malsburg <malsburg at posteo.de> writes:

> I think there are two issues:
>
> - the variable size of undo steps
> - the error when redoing.

Yes, but one makes the other more serious.

> The first issue arises from the fact that Evil considers anything that
> happens from entering insert mode until leaving it as one edit.

That was I thought until I observed, multiple times, how undo worked one
char at a time after writing some text. No mode change, no cursor
movement, just writing text and then undoing.

I'm not so sure about this, but I also observed how undo removes
multiple chunks of text that were written with mode changes and cursor
movements in between.

[snip]

> The second issue is the error that you're observing when redoing.  I
> never encountered this problem.

This happens every other month, but it hurts.

There are other problems on undo-tree, although not of the data-loss
type. It looks quite unreliable to me. IIRC the author explained on
emacs-devel that some characteristics of Emacs' undo implementation made
things difficult for him.

I still don't know if not using undo-tree has consequences on Evil's
behavior, apart from going back to traditional Emacs undo features, but
let's assume that there is no problem, so I'll ditch undo-tree.