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Undo / delete of selected entries from History


antonjw

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I was wondering what you'd think to the idea of being able to undo, and/or, remove individual or groups of items from the history?

You do have a very comprehensive history system there; I wanted to take it further by removing a box and the colour fills that I had done from my image, after doing lots more to it since, so I wanted to highlight only those items in the history and just hit the Undo button, but found that I couldn't do this, as when i click on an item in the History it automatically steps back to that point.

I think it should not do that - if the user wants to do that, perhaps you should add 2 new 'radio' buttons to the history box - a 'rewind' & 'fast forward' - and use these for 'Rewind (Step back to this point)' and 'Fast Forward (Step forward to this point)'.

This would allow for even more control of the history than I have actually described above, as you;d be able to 'rewind' to a specified point and then fast forward not to the end, but to another specified point....

You could even implement Rewind & Fast Forward in such a way that if the user selected multiple items in the list, then you could rewind between the last selected item and first, or fast forward in the opposite manner.

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The first part makes sense -- essentially you want to pluck out an item that you did previously and not effect what was done afterward.

Unfortunately this really messes with causality. Everything you've done after that is building on top of what you already did (remember, Paint.NET is a raster, or pixel-based, image editor -- in the end everything is stored as pixels, not as vectors or commands). It just wouldn't work with Paint.NET's architecture. There was actually a point in v1.0's development where this almost happened (the ability to 'pluck' history items), but the development cost was determined to be too high, and it was a change that was so fundamental that everything would've had to be rewritten.

Starting with your 3rd paragraph, I don't follow you. We already have undo, redo, rewind, and fast foward buttons, as well as the ability to rewind or fast forward to specific points in the history list just by clicking on the item.

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I see what you mean Rick about causality, the program would have to be pretty clever to remember what else has been done to the portion of the image that you are trying to undo individually... (possibly it goes back to the object model idea.... if the program is aware that an object has been removed, then it can re-apply everything else that has been done afterwards, to the remaining objects in the image - would be very clever and probably processor-intensive though!)

As for my third paragraph, I was really thinking as I typed at that point, but being new to the program, hadn't realised that the other two buttons you have on the History are already called Rewind & Fast Forward!

I was thinking that you might be able to highlight a set of history items and either rewind from the last selected to the first selected, or vice versa, fast forward from the first selected to the last selected (rather than simply to the end of the list). I was also proposing two new 'radio' buttons to differentiate between the current ones.

But, anyway, this encounters the same issue with causality that you highlighted.

Thanks for your explanation.

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I was thinking that you might be able to highlight a set of history items and either rewind from the last selected to the first selected, or vice versa, fast forward from the first selected to the last selected (rather than simply to the end of the list). I was also proposing two new 'radio' buttons to differentiate between the current ones.

Right but you can already just click on any item in the history list to 'jump' to that point in 'time'.

The Paint.NET Blog: https://blog.getpaint.net/

Donations are always appreciated! https://www.getpaint.net/donate.html

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