egyptianbman/vim-git-backup

Back up your files automatically, using git

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
• fugitive
• fzf
• 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.

export VIM_CUSTOM_BACKUP_DIRECTORY=~/some/folder

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:

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 or 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:

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 to do make it easier to write.

With the wrapper, you can now do things like

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:

: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