Revision history

Premium Revision history is one of three features that need a trial or a paid plan. See Licensing.

Shady Notes can keep a version history of every note and let you read or restore any earlier state.

Screenshot revision-history-overlay.png

The revision history overlay showing a timeline of versions for a note.

Turning it on

Preferences → History. Once enabled, Shady Notes commits changes in the background as you write — there is no save button and no manual snapshot step.

When a version is recorded

Not on every keystroke. Two rules decide:

• A minimum interval between commits, so a burst of typing produces one version rather than hundreds.
• A content hash check — if the text is unchanged, nothing is recorded, so opening and closing a note without editing does not add noise.

Both are configurable in Preferences → History.

Browsing and restoring

The timeline lists every recorded version with its timestamp. Select one to read it, or compare two side by side in the Navigator’s diff panel.

Restoring writes the old content back as a new version — the history is append-only, so restoring is itself undoable.

Where it is stored

In a git repository outside your vault, so the notes folder stays clean and has no .git directory in it. → The git backend

If you turn it off

Existing history is kept, not deleted. Re-enabling picks up where it left off. The repository can be removed by hand if you want the disk space back — see the git backend page for where it lives.