How do I view all available branches in Vim's undo tree to recover changes that u and Ctrl-R can't reach?

Explanation

Vim's undo history is a tree, not a linear stack. Every time you make a change after undoing previous changes, a new branch is created — meaning earlier edits can become unreachable with plain u and <C-r>. The :undolist command displays all leaf nodes of the undo tree, letting you navigate to otherwise hidden states.

How it works

Running :undolist shows a table with these columns:

• number — the undo sequence number, used with :undo {n}
• changes — how many changes this branch contains
• when — timestamp of the last change on this branch
• saved — marker if this state was written to disk

Once you identify a branch number, use :undo {n} to jump directly to that undo state.

Example

:undolist
number  changes  when
     3        2  35 seconds ago
     7        5  just now

To restore undo state 3:

:undo 3

Tips

• :undo 0 returns to the initial (unmodified) state of the buffer
• Use g- and g+ to walk through all undo states in chronological order, including branches that u skips
• Enable :set undofile to persist the undo tree across sessions so you can recover from previous editing sessions
• For a visual undo tree browser, the undotree plugin wraps these commands in a navigable sidebar