Cursor: How I rollback multi-file changes
Yay! Cursor is fun. All the way up until you accept some large multi-file change only to realize it was a mistake, but there’s no simple way to rollback.
But there is. You can rollback! Use dura!
After New Years 2022 I spent a couple days building dura. The tool is real simple, it just makes Git commits in a background thread to a branch you never see unless you go looking for it. Every time a file changes, it’ll make a commit.
So now, when I find myself wallowing in a Cursor-inflicted hell hole, I just pop open my
git log (tig --all for those that partake), and roll back to the change just prior
to my idiocy.
Back when I made it, tools like Cursor or Github Copilot didn’t exist. It was worth it to me simply just for that once-or-twice a year mistake where I royally mess up my repo. For example, last week I was writing a script and made changes a bit too fast and ended up deleting my whole working directory, including the script I was executing.
The beauty of dura is that you forget its there. It just silently does it’s thing until one day you desperately need it. It would be a terrible startup idea, so I released it open source.
Using Dura
The readme has good enough install instructions. It works very well on MacOS. The homebrew installer installs it as a service so you can truly forget about it. It also works great on Windows and Linux, I just took special care with the homebrew installer.
Don’t forget to watch a directory:
dura watch ~/code
It doesn’t watch your entire computer, so you have to give it some clues as to where you write code.
Sharp Edges
For the most part, it works great. But I’ve gotten bitten when I try to revert to a dura commit and it includes a dura commit. Once I tried pushing 1.5 GB of Git changes to Github. Oops.
Don’t push dura commits
The thing about dura commits is that it makes the commit before you update your .gitignore.
So dura commits end up including things like database files, passwords, etc. I just added
a git pre-push hook to check commit messages for it.
Conclusion
Enjoy!
Well, actually, I hope you ignore it and forget it exists. But definitely go install it.