Version control extensions¶

Local History¶

When working on prototypes, it’s difficult to commit often small changes. There are roughly two schools:

Commit often in bulk with a “WIP” commit message. Then squash (or not!) the series of WIP commits before pushing to the remote repository.
Not committing often, and then intermediate work can be lost if the code is not in a folder with frequent backups (DropBox, Time Machine etc).

For people not committing often, there is an extension that will save your life.

Command: CTRL+P and ext install xyz.local-history

This extension will create a .history subfolder in any folder opened in VS Code, where copies of text files are regularly stored.

The extension adds a command Local history: Show all which enable the user to navigate to previous version of the current file.

It also adds a “LOCAL HISTORY” pane to the EXPLORER pane (first icon on the left). Clicking on any version opens a window highlighting the changes.

When installing this extension, one should additionally.

Exclude the .history/ subfolder from the VS Code explorer by adding it to the files.exclude setting to the user JSON settings:

    "files.exclude": {
        ".history/": true,
    },

Exclude the .history/ subfolder from Git by adding the following line in .gitignore:

.history/

A good extension for history navigation, both for the whole source code, or for an individual file.

Command: CTRL+P and ext install donjayamanne.githistory

Example use:

CTRL+SHIFT+P, Git: View History (git log) to open the repository history window.

or try Git: View File History on an open file.

To contribute or maintain mature projects. Not necessary at first.

We’ll discuss later how to use Commitizen to manage commit messages, version bumps and release notes.

TODO: link to the project management advice