Re: Undo/Redo
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg118546] Re: Undo/Redo
- From: Barak Shoshany <baraksh at gmail.com>
- Date: Mon, 2 May 2011 06:52:46 -0400 (EDT)
- References: <ipjca2$j2i$1@smc.vnet.net>
On May 1, 1:22 pm, Bill Rowe <readn... at sbcglobal.net> wrote: > On 4/30/11 at 5:53 AM, bara... at gmail.com (Barak Shoshany) wrote: > > >This seems to be a recurring subject in this group. > >Mathematica is now at version 8 and there's still no multiple undo > >and redo functionality. I don't understand how such an amazing piece > >of software can lack such a trivial feature. Why isn't Woflram doing > >anything about it? Heck, I'll even write the code for undo/redo > >myself for them for free if they let me. Is there someone at Wolfram > >I can complain on the matter? Perhaps an internet petition is in > >order? What do you think? > > Simply put, implementation of undo/redo for something like > Mathematica is far more complex than you suggest. > > Undo/redo in a text editor or word processor is manipulating > what I will call static text, i.e., text that is to be > read/printed etc that does not change the state of your machine, > it not executed. This isn't the case for Mathematica. > > You really need to think about what you mean by say undo in the > context of Mathematica. What does it mean to undo a computation? > Keep in mind, many mathematical operations have no simple inverse. > > Reverting the state of a text document to a previous state is > quite simple compared to doing the same for a Mathematica session. I'm only talking about the case of editing text in input cells. It's quite simple, really. Before pressing Shift+Enter you're just editing some text, nothing more complicated than that. And sometimes it might be a lot of text in a single cell. An undo/redo feature while editing this text would be very very helpful and would have saved me a lot of work.