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looking at what things you can undo/redo tells you what things the software developer saw as 'meaningful actions' you can't usually undo moving a window around, because that's thought of as 'a superficial UI change'

the undo/redo tree almost encodes what things are in the domain of 'real operations' vs 'superficial UI changes' in the heads of the developers
it's like the difference between React props and state
if you can undo it, it's a meaningful change
of course, to the beginner, everything is a meaningful operation, even minor view changes; you haven't learned to chunk things together in the way that an expert would hav

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Andy Matuschak

@andy_matuschak

Replying to

@rsnous

It’s really interesting to me how “pro” tools often make *selection* an undoable action. Disorienting at first, but clearly essential in those contexts.

2:39 PM · Oct 18, 2019Twitter for iPhone

Replying to

and

Photoshop has a setting for whether layer visibility changes are undoable—in most other contexts, this would be weird to undo, but in PS, especially given the ability to invert visibility (and hide 99% of the document with one click) it’s essential to me.

Replying to

and

[on different note, reading the screenshot] Has React become a lingua franca for talking about software architecture in general? I wonder how often an abstract concept ("OOP", "actors") has needed one popular implementation for a while BEFORE we fully own the abstraction itself.

Replying to

and

My semi-pro tool is taking the medium road — I restore selection on undo and redo but you can’t undo selection itself.