The practical usage is it's aways possible to get back to a previous state you were in, which is pretty neat.

e.g. You can undo 5 changes, try something else and decide that you prefered the text before you started undoing things. In most programs with a linear undo history you've wiped out your previous changes but not in Vim.

You can hop about the branches of the undo tree using the g+ and g- commands but it's much easier to add an undo tree visualiser plugin such as the venerable old Gundo[2].

1. https://neovim.io/doc/user/undo.html

2. https://docs.stevelosh.com/gundo.vim/

Unfortunately, when you're at "now" you can't do ":later 30m" to see the future.

I miss elVis also. ViM should be banned from all distros because it is literally nag-ware and charity ware (Uganda 's children thing). 30 years later we still can't edit files bigger than RAM size unless you want to use swap file ...

Even commodore 64 had editors which could edit files bigger than RAM and WITHOUT ANY kind of swapping to the disk.

/rant