The History Ruler

Field goes to a lot of lengths to store the history of your interaction with it. For example all versions of any sheet are available at any time through the History palette, "version controlled" information about any property ending in _v can be accessed via code (see the _self.history pseudo property)

Turning this on it's head, and interacting with your history of using Field is a powerful thing to do: it can go a lot to answering the questions Where am I? how did I get here? can I go back? which, in turn, promote the kind of fast, no-notes experimental coding that is Field's raison d'être.

Click fullscreen (bottom right) and turn scaling "off" (top right) for best viewing.

The Text Editor offers a (growing) set of rulers that can appear in the left hand side of the editor that annotate the text that you are editing:

The buttons for selecting a ruler live down in the bottom left. Selecting the history ruler will probably get you something like this:

Which spins round and round as Field crunches the history of the visual element that you are editing. When the information appears, you'll get a graphical representation of what lines in the file changed when.

Specifically, this is a history of the lines focused on the lines currently in the file — not shown is anything about lines that have been deleted.

Some orientation: time goes from left (most recent) to right (oldest); groups of lines that have common editing histories are clumped together so you can quickly gloss how things are generally edited together.

Mousing over a 'node' in the ruler shows you what that line used to be:

Using the left and right arrow keys lets you scrub forward and backwards in time:

Finally, while the ruler is visible, : pops up the history of the line that you are currently editing:

Perhaps you were right all along last week? Selecting a line from the popup menu replaces that line with a previous decision.