Undo/Redo implementation

Question

Give me some thoughts how to implement undo/redo functionality - like we have in text editors. What algorithms should I use and what I may read. thanks.

Answer 1

I have written two text editors from scratch, and they both employ a very primitive form of undo/redo functionality. By "primitive", I mean that the functionality was very easy to implement, but that it is uneconomical in very large files (say >> 10 MB). However, the system is very flexible; for instance, it supports unlimited levels of undo.

Basically, I define a structure like

type
  TUndoDataItem = record
    text: /array of/ string;
    selBegin: integer;
    selEnd: integer;
    scrollPos: TPoint;
  end;

and then define an array

var
  UndoData: array of TUndoDataItem;

Then each member of this array specifies a saved state of the text. Now, on each edit of the text (character key down, backspace down, delete key down, cut/paste, selection moved by mouse etc.), I (re)start a timer of (say) one second. When triggered, the timer saves the current state as a new member of the UndoData array.

On undo (Ctrl+Z), I restore the editor to the state UndoData[UndoLevel - 1] and decrease the UndoLevel by one. By default, UndoLevel is equal to the index of the last member of the UndoData array. On redo (Ctrl+Y or Shift+Ctrl+Z), I restore the editor to the state UndoData[UndoLevel + 1] and increase the UndoLevel by one. Of course, if the edit timer is triggered when UndoLevel is not equal to the length (minus one) of the UndoData array, I clear all items of this array after UndoLevel, as is common on the Microsoft Windows platform (but Emacs is better, if I recall correctly -- the disadvantage of the Microsoft Windows approach is that, if you undo a lot of changes and then accidentally edit the buffer, the previous content (that was undid) is permanently lost). You might want to skip this reduction of the array.

In a different type of program, for instance, an image editor, the same technique can be applied, but, of course, with a completely different UndoDataItem structure. A more advanced approach, which does not require as much memory, is to save only the changes between the undo levels (that is, instead of saving "alpha\nbeta\gamma" and "alpha\nbeta\ngamma\ndelta", you could save "alpha\nbeta\ngamma" and "ADD \ndelta", if you see what I mean). In very large files where each change is small compared to the file size, this will greatly decrease the memory usage of the undo data, but it is trickier to implement, and possibly more error-prone.