I happened across an interesting post about Undo this afternoon.

The author is the guy behind “e – Textmate for Windows“, which looks to be a pretty slick little editor.

Now, I can’t say much to the editor (at least not yet, but I plan on taking a closer look).

But his comments on Undo struck me as particularly prescient.

I’ve had a nagging feeling for years that Undo (even of the “unlimited” variety that’s in just about every app out there now), was not really what it could or should be. The Undo Visualization is particularly nice, as is the idea of branching. I’ve seen something similar in graphics packages before (though I can’t remember which ones off hand). Never seen anything like it in a text editor or IDE, though.

His solution and implementation really points out the inadequacies of the typical modern undo. Granted, some of it might be a little advanced for a casual user. But for a casual user, the standard Ctrl-Z multi level undo should continue to work just fine anyway.