Viewing File History with Time-lapse View

Time-lapse View provides an interactive graphical representation of a file's history, showing when lines were added, changed, and deleted, who made the changes, and when the changes were made. Time-lapse View enables you to browse forward and back through changes dynamically, enabling you to locate changes of interest. Detail panes at the bottom of the window provide more information about selected chunks.

Note

Time-lapse view of image files works differently than described here. For more information, see Viewing Image File History with Time-lapse View.

To control the display, use the following settings and features.

Toolbar

Mode

Determines how many revisions are displayed. Options are:

  • Single revision: one revision at a time is displayed

  • Incremental diffs: two adjacent revisions are displayed, with changes highlighted

  • Multiple revisions: a range of revisions is displayed, with changes highlighted

Content range

Specifies the starting and ending revision displayed.

Scale

Specifies the unit used: changelist number, date, or revision number.

User

Toggles display of the user that made the change.

Aging

Displays color coding to indicate how recently a change was entered. The darker the shading, the more recent the change.

Line numbers

Toggles display of line numbers.

Lifetimes

Toggles display of lifetimes, which are graphics that indicate by their width how long the adjacent chunk of text has been in the file.

Direct history

Display file revision history without reference to branching history.

Branch history

Display branching (merge/integration) history. Branch information appears above the timeline.

Originating changelist

Display information for the originating changelist for each revision. For a revision that has been integrated from another codeline, the branching history view provides changelist information only for the integration, not necessarily the changelist in which the content of the file was actually changed; that is, the originating changelist.

Find

Search text

Go to

In single revision mode, go to specified line number.

Next/previous diff

Go to next or previous change.

Line ending

Specifies how line endings and whitespace are treated to determine differences.

Slider

The slider enables you to browse rapidly through file revisions. The appearance of the slider corresponds to the mode you select. The unit by which the slider advances is specified by the mode you select (date, changelist, or revision). The revision, date, or changelist number is displayed under the slider.

Mode Slider Appearance Description

single revision

Move it to the right to display the next file revision or left to display the previous revision.

incremental diffs

Move it to the right to display the next pair of file revisions, or left to display the previous pair of file revisions.

multiple revisions

Move the right and left halves separately, to control how many revisions are displayed.