Timeline view in VS Code

Today I want to talk about one of my favorite VS Code features that I think is often overlooked or undervalued, the Timeline view. 

The Timeline view is a unified view for visualizing time-series events (for example, Git commits, file saves, test runs, etc.) for a file. It allows you to jump through time very quickly to any point within a file and compare it with the current version or revert to any version of the file. That is right, the Timeline view makes time travel possible. 

Now I know you always commit every change to version control, so you probably don’t need this feature, but I don’t…so to me it is very handy when you are rapidly developing on something that you are saving and trying different things often. It saves you from pressing the undo button many times to get back to a state, or lets you jump back a few experiments to start from a different point in time. 

I also really like how it mixes both git commit timelines and local file saves. This can also be handy depending on your workflow. Time Traveling back to before a commit and just a local save can be extremely helpful.  

Here is an example of a file I was recently working on that shows the mix of both local history and git commits.  

To avoid filling up your disk space, VS Code has a few important settings that control how much local history is stored. 

Max File Entries.

Max File Size 

Merge Window 

The defaults have worked well for me, but feel free to tweak to your desired settings. 

I hope after learning about this powerful VS Code feature it is something that you can implement into your development workflow to help make your life easier.