History panel, handle with care

[Wim Daniels]

Using the history panel can be quite dangerous. If you select a step in your history and click in your document, all your future steps are lost (because you made a new selection, starting from the step you selected in the history). There is no way of getting them back as any undo action will start from the step you selected going backwards. I think the history panel should have it's own undo function.

Moreover, but this may be regarded as a feature request: what I felt I should be able to do, is to remove a step, for instance the deletion of an object that I want to get back.

[LilleG]

The ability to go back and delete one step while keeping the ones that came after is a feature that would be very handy when it turns out that what looked fine with these additions goes seriously bad when you add this now-desired one.  Of course, you can delete the interfering one and work your way forward again but a non-destructive delete in History would be a great time-saver.

[Peter Werner]

A "selectively delete past history items" feature is usually extremely difficult to implement. Think about all the time travel movies you have seen and all the logical and philosophical questions that they raise and you will have an impression of what it would be like from a software engineering point of view.

 

Even if somebody wrote some very complex logic to figure out which future steps depend on a certain history item and delete those as well (and those that depend on them and those that depend on those and so on), you would be creating lots of unpredictable situations.  It would also likely be a source of a lot of stability issues since occasional bugs are unavoidable with complex problems like that.

 

Though the developers would be more qualified to speak about their specific case of course.

 

 

That being said, the "one wrong click, lose your whole history forever" issue is indeed a huge usability problem. It might be worth thinking about introducing some sort of branching feature inside the history instead of just maintaining a linear stack.

 

Or, even simpler: Just make going back to a certain history step create a "rewind history" command on top of the history stack as soon as any other operation is taken. Without deleting what is below, simply making "go back in history" perform like any other command. Any subsequent actions would then be added on top of that and hence the linear structure of the history could easily be maintained without generating dependency issues, requiring any history to be deleted, or causing any confusion for the user.

[LilleG]

I understand the difficulty outlined in the first part of your reply and agree that it would be too difficult to implement, especially for a seldom used function.  As a personal rather than professional user, it wouldn't be that onerous for me to simply work my way forward again so I'll withdraw my support for that.

 

I'm not sure that I understand how the last paragraph would work in terms of correcting what had turned out to be a mistake.  Does the proposed "rewind history" contain the steps following the deletion?  And you just chose to reapply them as a group?

[Peter Werner]

Sorry for the confusion, that is just a suggestion for a very straightforward way to solve to the problem outlined in the original post: Going back in history and making any change irrevocably deletes any subsequent history, making it impossible to go "back to the future" if you make a change that might be as simple as accidentally clicking in your document view.

 

It would work like this: Go back to a history step of your choice. Make a change. Instead of all your history from the point that you went back to onward disappearing for good, a new "Go back in history" entry would show up at the end of the list, followed by the change you made. It still wouldn't allow you to selectively modify things you did in the past and leave all subsequent history applied, but it would prevent you from accidentally erasing your history with no way to go back. It would essentially allow you to undo the "Go back in History" like any other action you take.

 

 

In general, both Designer and Photo allow you to work pretty much non-destructively so that you can always edit things directly without having to rely on changing things in the past of the document. For instance, if you move something in your document, then do some work, you can usually just manually move that thing back instead of having to go through history. 

 

A convenient trick is also to use Copy & Paste: Since Edit > Copy will not affect your Undo stack, you can go back in history, copy something, then go back to the future and paste. Just keep in mind that making selections may trigger the aforementioned "erasing your history" issue, which I hope will be solved in the future.

 

I usually save file revisions whenever I make major changes. So files would be named "client-project-publication-XXXX.extension" (such as "johnsbrewery-tradeshow2015-banner-0007.indd" for revision 7) and whenever I start work on making any significant changes, I do a "Save as…" to a new revision first. That's also a way to deal with a client saying "I know I said I want the logo bigger, but I actually liked it better before.". And you can always selectively copy & paste elements from multiple older revisions to the current one if you only want to restore a certain piece of your design.

 

Affinity Photo also offers Snapshots through a dedicated panel which can be used for similar purposes, you might want to look into those as well.

[LilleG]

Thanks for the explanation.  I see what you mean now.