[[!meta title="Local File History Possibilities in Emacs"]] [[!meta copyright="Copyright © 2026 Wouter Groeneveld"]] [[!inline pages="internal(2026/info/local-nav)" raw="yes"]] # Local File History Possibilities in Emacs Wouter Groeneveld - , [[!inline pages="internal(2026/info/local-before)" raw="yes"]] Emacs offers a myriad of ways to keep track of previous versions of your document: through tilde-like backup files, auto-save files, and of course the extensive built-in undo history system. Navigating that can be a chore unless you install something like vundo to visualize the undo tree. But with a huge undo-limit, even vundo can become unwieldy. What if we can conjure up a way to diff between the current document and the state it was in ten or twenty minutes ago, not unlike IntelliJ's local history system? Using a combination of Consult (preview) and diff-buff, that can be easily done! In this lightning talk, we'll explore how to quickly browse through diff history and roll back using built-in Emacs tooling. [[!inline pages="internal(2026/info/local-after)" raw="yes"]] [[!inline pages="internal(2026/info/local-nav)" raw="yes"]]