Time Travel

CoCalc calls “Time Travel” the historic recording of all changes in a file. This works for all text-based documents in a Frame Editor and also Jupyter Notebooks, Sage Worksheets, and LaTeX Editor.

To open it, click on the light blue button with the reversed cirular arrow around a clock:

_images/time-travel-button.png

Then you can see the underlying history, e.g. here for exactly this time-travel.rst file of the documentation in front of you.

  • (1) is the control knob of the slider
  • (2) to view changes between two revisions
  • (3) to revert the file back to the given revision. This doesn’t undo the history, but adds a new entry at the end. No changes get lost.

For very long histories, another button will show up to load the entire history.

_images/time-travel-ui.png

With [x] Changes enabled, you get a two-ended slider to see the changes between these two revisions:

_images/time-travel-changes.png

For more information, read this blog post about time travel.

Export History

As of March 2019, an additional Export button was added. It generates a machine-readable representation of all changes, summarizing who made them and when exactly. This can be used to track the depth of contributions to a specific file, e.g. students in the context of a group project.

Note, that the "user": "Project: ..." is the backend process modifying the file, i.e. that’s not a human person.