Simplysm Local History

🇰🇷 한국어 설명은 아래에 있습니다.

Records every change to your workspace files, shows what each change did as a before/after diff, and restores files or folders to just before a change — like WebStorm's Local History.

Git only protects what you commit. This extension records your files as you change them, so you can restore files after a bad refactor, an accidental delete, or a botched move + undo, even if you never committed. Unlike the built-in Timeline, it also works on folders — see what changed across a whole folder and restore it.

Features

• Automatic recording — changes are recorded in the background as you work, including changes made outside VS Code. Changes made in a quick burst, like git checkout, are grouped into one change; a pause of more than 0.7 seconds starts the next change.
• History of a file or a folder — right-click a file or folder in the Explorer → Show History. The Local History view lists the changes, newest first.
  • You can also run Simplysm Local History: Show History from the Command Palette to see the history of the file in the active editor — even if that file has been deleted.
  • Each change shows its time. In a folder's history it also names the changed files.
  • Expand a change in a folder's history to see its files as a folder tree, each marked added, deleted, modified, renamed from …, or moved to ….
  • The first 100 changes are shown. Load more… at the end of the list shows the next 100.
• Before ↔ after diff — select a change to compare the state just before it (left) with the state just after it (right) in the built-in diff editor. A folder's change opens as a multi-file diff.
  • Select a range (Shift+click) to compare the state just before its earliest change with the state just after its latest change. To compare with your current files, select a range from the top change down to the change you want.
  • Select files or folders under a change to compare only those.
  • Every file type is shown the way VS Code shows the current file: binary files get VS Code's binary-file notice, images are shown side by side, and text follows your encoding settings (files.encoding). Files of any size are recorded and restored; only files larger than 2 GiB can't be shown in a diff — open them in the default app instead.
• Open in the default app — for formats VS Code can't show (Excel, PDF, …), right-click a change in a file's history, or a file under a change in a folder's history → Open in Default App (Before This Change) or (After This Change). A read-only copy opens, so your files and history stay as they are. Not available in remote sessions (Remote-SSH, WSL, containers).
  • Files that run when opened (for example .exe, .bat, .cmd) ask before running the old version.
• Restore only what you pick — click Restore to Before This Change on a change, a selected range, a folder, or files under a change. Only those files go back to the state just before the change; later changes to other files stay. Files created by the change are deleted, and files deleted by it come back.
  • A confirmation first shows how many files will change and how many will be deleted. If any of them has unsaved edits, it says those edits will be saved first.
  • The current state is recorded right before restoring, and the restore itself is recorded as a change — so you can restore a restore, too.
• Renames — a file's history continues across renames, including moves to another folder of a multi-root workspace. In a folder's history, restoring a rename puts the file back under its old name.
• Keeps your repo clean — history is stored outside the workspace; nothing is added to your Git repository. History is kept for one year.
• Exclude files — the simplysm-local-history.exclude setting adds glob patterns on top of files.exclude and files.watcherExclude. Each pattern means what it means in VS Code: simplysm-local-history.exclude follows the same rules as files.exclude (a trailing / is ignored, a leading ! is taken literally), and files.watcherExclude covers exactly the files VS Code's file watcher doesn't report.
  • On startup, files matching files.exclude or simplysm-local-history.exclude are also removed from existing history.
  • Files matching only files.watcherExclude stop being recorded but keep their history. Opening that history shows the reason at the top of the list.
  • Conditional files.exclude patterns (when, for example hiding a .js file next to a .ts file of the same name) are not applied — those files are still recorded.
  • Like VS Code's file watcher, files under a folder that is a symbolic link or junction are recorded only if that folder is listed in files.watcherInclude.
• English/Korean UI.

Note: changes made while VS Code is closed are not recorded one by one — on startup, only the resulting state of each changed file is recorded.