Undoing and Redoing Changes

How to reverse recent edits — reading what undo will do before you press it, and jumping back several steps at once.

Every edit you make to a model can be reversed. Metapad keeps a list of your recent changes and tells you what each one was, so you never have to undo blind.

The three buttons

In the toolbar at the top of the model editor you'll find, left to right:

• ↩ Undo — reverse your most recent change
• ↪ Redo — put it back
• 🕘 History — open the full list of recent changes

All three grey out when there's nothing to reverse.

See what undo will do before you press it

Hover over Undo and the tooltip names the exact change it would reverse — for example Undo: Delete node 'Regional Warehouse' or Redo: Edit relationship type 'supplies'. Redo does the same for the change it would restore.

This matters when you've been working for a while: instead of pressing ⌘+Z and hoping, you can check first.

Jump back several steps at once

Click History to open the list. It reads top to bottom as time running forwards:

• Entries under Redo are changes you've already undone and can restore.
• Entries under History are your recent changes, newest first.

Click any entry to return the model to the state just before it. Picking the fourth entry down undoes four changes in one go — useful when you suspect something went wrong a few actions ago but aren't sure which one.

Good to know

• Undo covers everything you edit, not just the canvas: nodes, relationships, properties, folders, node types, diagrams and views.
• ⌘+Z / Ctrl+Z works anywhere in the editor — except while you're typing in a text field, where it undoes your typing instead.
• Metapad remembers your last 50 changes.
• Undo only covers your own changes in this session. It's not a way to reverse a teammate's edit — though your teammates do see your undo immediately, just like any other change.
• The list starts fresh when you open a different model, import a model, or roll back to an earlier version.
• If a change can't be reversed — usually because a collaborator has since removed something it depended on — Metapad tells you and stops there rather than half-applying it.

When undo isn't enough

Undo is for the last few minutes of work. To go back further — to yesterday, or to a milestone you'd marked — use the Versions tab instead. See Model Versioning and Rollback.