Fusion360-style Edit History Timeline
Rather than ephemeral edit lists, please implement an edit history timeline such as that found in Fusion360 that is updated and preserved between saves.
The pointer on this timeline (shown on the right of the history timeline below) can be placed at any arbitrary point to "roll back" edits, and even animated to reconstruct the entire build for demo or instructional purposes using the play/pause/run controls (shown on the left of the history timeline below). Items in the timeline can be moved or even deleted if necessary.
2 Comments
Having a history of the latest few operations would be nice for quicker undos. But a list of the whole project would be madness, especially saving it in the project file. (I have my undo memory set to 8 GB and I run out of that quite regularly, rarely getting anywhere close to the 256 potential steps the program offers as a maximum.)
The ability to "play" an animation of that undo history seems quite needless. (not to mention insane for some operations....)
For demo and instructional purposes, a screen recording is generally better.
Personal opinion of mine. Blender isn't a CAD tool and it really shouldn't be one. 3D modeling for engineering work and 3D modeling for artistic work needs different approaches. Blender should focus on what it does best, and that is artistic work. (hot take, I think even the Grease pencil stuff is a large enough distraction from fixing rather major issues in the core program, but the Grease pencil is at least artistic.)
That would be really hard to implement. If we add that, we run into some problems: we don't have icons for every possible action. Blender has a lot of menus - Mesh, Select, UV, Vertex, etc. Saving the undo history in the file would increase the file size, and this undo bar would take up more space in the window.
Still, it would be nice to see an undo bar that you could scroll, like in Zbrush.