EditTrail

Go back and forward through the places you edited, across files, in Sublime Text 4. Like VS Code's "Go to Last Edit Location".

Sublime's jump_back follows every cursor jump, and prev_modification stays within one file. EditTrail follows only your edits, in the order you made them.

Usage

No keys are bound by default. Add your own via Preferences: EditTrail Key Bindings, for example:

{ "keys": ["ctrl+."], "command": "edit_trail_back" },
{ "keys": ["ctrl+shift+."], "command": "edit_trail_forward" },

Both commands are also in the command palette under "EditTrail".

Nearby edits merge into one location, locations move with the text, and closed files reopen when you go back to them. History is per window and resets when Sublime restarts.

Settings

Preferences: EditTrail Settings

• max_entries (50): edit locations kept per window.
• merge_line_distance (5): edits this close to the newest location, in the same file, update it. The same distance is what counts as "already here" when navigating, so locations within it of the cursor are skipped.
• debug (false): print each edit to the console (View > Show Console), saying whether it added a location, merged into the newest one, or was ignored. Useful when a location shows up that you did not expect.

Development

Needs uv and just.

just install-dev   # link this checkout into Sublime's Packages dir
just qa            # lint, format check, type check, tests on Python 3.14 and 3.8
just               # list every recipe

Tests come in four layers: examples and stateful property tests against a fake Sublime API, an AST check that every listener hook is a name Sublime actually dispatches, and st_tests/, which runs inside a real editor to catch the editor itself changing. CI runs all of them on Linux, macOS and Windows.

CONTRIBUTING.md, in the repository rather than the installed package, is the developer guide: a Sublime API primer for people who know Python but have never written a plugin, a map of the repository, what each test layer is blind to, debugging, conventions and the release process. The design itself is the module docstring at the top of edit_trail.py.