I've found Local History on these JetBrains IDEs to be really helpful too. Particularly when combined with "Put Label" command (which I assign to a keyboard shortcut). This lets you insert a descriptive label info the stream of your local history snapshots (such as before you attempt something), so you can go straight to one of those labels and diff against current. Useful when you're trying out an approach with parts that may be discarded, as it's handy for reverting lines of current or overwriting and inserting blocks back from the snapshots. You automatically get a label after certain events, like a test fail or VCS commit. I think there's a snapshot after every save too, and you can configure autosave to happen whenever the editor pane loses focus of you want to.
The only things to watch out for with local history in these IDEs is that the snapshots are deleted after five days by default, and all are wiped if you need to delete your IDE cache for any reason.
It has even saved me when I managed to delete a file not checked in yet. Just recreate the file with the same name, and then local history is available (or possibly local history on the parent folder would find it as well)
This is part of the IntelliJ IDEA platform, so all of the JetBrains IDE products have it. I don’t use it often, since I normally rely on Git, but it’s saved me several times after I accidentally deleted a file or made a mistake with Git.
Indeed it’s one of the reasons why I’m staying with JetBrains products. It’s really efficient, we can compare side by side the local history to understand where it went wrong all while keeping the git history clean.
Because while I could do the same manually with git, when I’m in the flow thinking about/building/debugging a particular piece of code, moving out to select files to add to git and then filling a message for that piece of code that isn’t working and doing that every few minutes to preserve intermediate state is a nightmare for my productivity.
It can and should be done automatically by the IDE to enhance developper productivity by getting out of its mind. There is no reason why I should be thinking about that, isn’t that all the point of using IDE and tools to develop ?
Seems like using git for that is still re-inventing the wheel
This feature is absolutely outstanding, I use it all the time. Unfortunately they buried it in the "File" menu recently. It was so much easier to reach when it was unter "Version Control".
You can assign a custom shortcut to it via Settings > Keymap and then the action "Main Menu > File > Local History".
I myself have assigned the shortcut control+shift+=
The only things to watch out for with local history in these IDEs is that the snapshots are deleted after five days by default, and all are wiped if you need to delete your IDE cache for any reason.