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Undo and redo

Undo and Redo sit at the left-hand end of the toolbar. They step backwards and forwards through the edits you have made to the current design.

There is no limit on how far back you can go: the history holds every edit you have made since the design was opened. It lives in memory only, though, so it is not part of what gets saved, and it does not survive a reload.

On the web there are keyboard shortcuts for both: Ctrl+Z / Cmd+Z undoes, and either Ctrl+Shift+Z / Cmd+Shift+Z or Ctrl+Y / Cmd+Y redoes. They do exactly what the two buttons do, including in the modes that keep their own history (below), and they are ignored while you are typing in a field.

The left-hand end of the VanCAD toolbar: the Undo button, available, and beside it the Redo button, greyed out because nothing has been undone.

Undo

Section titled “Undo”

What it is. The left-most toolbar button, or Ctrl+Z / Cmd+Z. It is greyed out when there is nothing to undo - at the start of a fresh design, and again after a Load or a New design.

What it does. Reverses the last edit and puts you back exactly where you were before it. Press it repeatedly to walk back through the whole session, one edit at a time.

Options and limits. One press is one edit, not one gesture: dragging an object across the van in a single motion is one step, not a hundred, and a slider you sweep back and forth settles as one step too. Some choices are not edits at all and so are not on the stack - changing the base van starts a new design rather than modifying the current one, and it clears the history along with the old design. Display-only settings (metric or imperial, the ground and sky, the route view filter) are not edits either: they change how the design is shown, not what it is.

What it affects. Whatever the undone edit affected, including your bill of materials and weight total. Undoing the placement of a fridge removes its weight from the total again.

Redo

Section titled “Redo”

What it is. The button beside Undo, or Ctrl+Shift+Z / Cmd+Shift+Z (Ctrl+Y / Cmd+Y works too). It is greyed out unless you have just undone something.

What it does. Re-applies the most recently undone edit.

Options and limits. Redo is only available on an unbroken run of undos: making a new edit after undoing discards the redo history, because the design has taken a different path and the undone branch no longer follows on from it. Undo as far as you like and then redo forward again, but as soon as you change something the forward path is gone.

What it affects. The same as the edit it re-applies.

When the history is cleared

Section titled “When the history is cleared”
  • Loading a design, or starting a new one, clears it - history against a design you no longer have open would not mean anything.
  • Changing the base van clears it, for the same reason.
  • A tutorial does not. Starting a tutorial parks your design and its history, and both come back exactly as they were when the tutorial ends, so you can undo across a tutorial you took halfway through a build.
  • The custom-object editor keeps its own history, separate from the van’s. So does the openings draw mode, so undoing while drawing a shape steps back through the shape’s points rather than through your design. So does the measuring tool: with it open, Undo takes back the last measurement. In each case your design’s own history is untouched and waiting when you leave the mode.
Section titled “Related”