Ecosyste.ms: Awesome

An open API service indexing awesome lists of open source software.

Awesome Lists | Featured Topics | Projects

https://github.com/colinkennedy/vim-git-backup

Back up your files automatically, using git
https://github.com/colinkennedy/vim-git-backup

Last synced: about 1 month ago
JSON representation

Back up your files automatically, using git

Awesome Lists containing this project

README 

        
# vim-git-backup

A top notch file backup mechanism for Vim. Maintain copies of your files,

anywhere, and never lose anything again.



## How It Works

1. Work in Vim as you normally would.

2. Save your file.

3. vim-git-backup does everything else for you, in the background.



## Integrations

Because the file back ups happen using git, any tool which uses git as a backend

can be used to view or edit your backups.



Here's a few personal favorites



- [agit](https://github.com/cohama/agit.vim)

- [fugitive](https://github.com/tpope/vim-fugitive)

- [fzf](https://github.com/junegunn/fzf.vim)

- [gitk](https://git-scm.com/docs/gitk)



## Configuration

### Back-up Directory

Control the folder where backups are stored, either by setting the



`VIM_CUSTOM_BACKUP_DIRECTORY` environment variable or by setting `g:custom_backup_dir` in your .vimrc.



e.g.



```sh

export VIM_CUSTOM_BACKUP_DIRECTORY=~/some/folder

```



```vim

let g:custom_backup_dir = "~/some/folder"

```



### File Listing



By default, :GHistory's file list is in the order of

most-recently-updated. This calculation is a bit slow. If you want it

faster and don't care about file order, or just want file lists to be

alphabetical, use this:



```vim

let g:git_backup_keep_file_order = 0

```



## Why You Should Care

If you've ever wanted to do any of the following things, you will love this plugin:



1. Show the most recently edited files

2. See all changes from the previous revision

3. Diff the changes in the last week

4. Get a list of all changed files from the last X days

5. Get the all-time diff of the files in the current directory

6. Search for any text which you A. Don't remember what file you put it in B. Was deleted a while ago

7. Search for git commits which contain a phrase through EVERY revision of every file in the current directory

8. Get the search contents for each commit that contains a phrase through EVERY revision of every file in the current directory

9. Backup any file as it was, X days ago

10. Restore a previous version of a file

11. View your backups using a tool like [agit](https://github.com/cohama/agit.vim) or [fugitive](https://github.com/tpope/vim-fugitive)

12. Get a summary of what you've worked on over X days (for time-keeping purposes)



And did I mention, each scenario above applies both to "overall" but

also can be filtered using the current directory?



This simple plugin easily provides all of this functionality and more.

Interested? Read on!



## Working With vim-git-backup On Command-Line

So you've installed vim-git-backup and have a catalog of back-ups that

you want to start using. Great!



To summarize, you can use any git command to construct your own queries, like this:



```sh

git -C ~/.vim_custom_backups grep foo  # Search for "foo" across all commits and all files

git -C ~/.vim_custom_backups log  # Get all commit history for your backups

```



Personally, I find writing all that to be tedious so I wrote a [really

simple wrapper script](ghistory) to do make it easier to write.



With the wrapper, you can now do things like



```sh

ghistory grep -n foo -- .  # Search in the current directory for any commit containing "foo"

ghistry log -Sblah -- .  # Search log contents for "blah"

ghistory CHANGED  # Show every tracked file, in "date modified" order

ghistory CHANGED -- .  # Show every tracked file, in "date modified" order, of the current directory

```



The wrapper script has a many different example commands. The few above

are just a fraction of what's possible.



## Advanced Vim Commands

Beyond the automatic functionality of vim-git-backup, there's also some

helpful functions which you can call to view and restore back up files.

To learn more, run this while inside Vim:



```vim

:help vim-git-backup

:help vim-git-backup-advanced-commands

```



## Requires



- Vim 8.0+

- Linux (Windows support on-request)



## Special Thanks

This plugin idea came from

[this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/vim/comments/8w3udw/topnotch_vim_file_backup_history_with_no_plugins)