A fun bit of storytelling on the website for a git client Retcon:

I don’t have personal experience with Retcon. I definitely struggled a lot with git’s syntax over the years, and have my own cheatsheet that looks similar to this.

But what I really liked from this page was the elevation of undo to be the North Star. I think it’s very, very well deserved.

To the best of my knowledge, undo in its modern form arrived in 1983 with Apple Lisa – Byte magazine called it a “tremendous security blanket” – and then over the next decade or so blossomed into its current state: an infinite, multi-level, lightning-fast safety hatch that works pretty much everywhere, always there in the bottom-left corner of your keyboard, so second-nature you might not even realize you’re invoking it.

In early apps, before undo arrived, you had to be very careful about what you did and when you saved your work. Later on, undo worked on just one level, so you had to think a lot about how to spend it before things became irreversible.

Today, undo just works. It truly became Back Space: The Next Generation.

But any user-facing “just works” hand wave means a lot of people’s hard and invisible work behind the scenes. So if you’re reading this, and at some point in your career you worked on making undo better, my tip of the hat to you (and send me a message!).