As another comment mentioned, this is exactly how Emacs handles undo, so this is not revolutionary. Two important things to point out about this approach: 1.

As another comment mentioned, this is exactly how Emacs handles undo, so this is not revolutionary. Two important things to point out about this approach: 1. you will never lose any previous information (barring memory limitations). You can be confident any previous state can be retrieved somewhere along the linearized history, and you don't need to search along a potentially thousand branched tree. Just follow the linear history and you will find it. 2. this tracks the chronological state of the buffer. For some reason, people do seem to get confused with Emacs's undo functionality because they're familiar with the "Microsoft Word" style undo, but I feel like it's intuitive if you think of it as a literal timeline of the buffer state. If you want the state of the buffer five minutes ago, you will need to undo past the one minute ago state, the two minutes ago state, etc. And then two minutes later, you can undo two minutes back to get the same state again even though the "original" state is now seven minutes ago, because when you "undid" you brought the buffer back to that state in the present.