Chapter 04 · history & evidence
Timeline: moments & branches
Roono remembers everything, and — more importantly — it makes that memory useful. The Timeline is where “nothing is lost” stops being a promise and becomes a way of working.
The unit of memoryEvery save is a Moment
Roono saves continuously: a snapshot after two seconds of idle, and at every explicit action. Each snapshot is a Moment — immutable, content-addressed, and cheap, because paragraphs carry stable IDs and only the paragraphs that changed are stored anew. A hundred-thousand-word manuscript snapshots as easily as a page.
There is no save command and no “are you sure?” — the safety net is always on.
Time travel, with a mapBrowsing & comparing
The Timeline mode draws your Moments as a track: main runs left to right, branches split off below, agent runs appear as gold ◆ diamonds. Select any two points and the differences highlight inline, in the editor, against your current draft. Try it — every dot below is clickable.
The ferry left before dawn; the harbor master would not say who was aboard. March’s minute book was one page short — and page seven was the one that named the contractors.
Click a moment (or tab to it and press Enter) to read the draft as it stood then. The ◆ is an accepted agent proposal; the accent track is the “bolder lede” branch.
Try it without betting the draftBranching
From any Moment you can start a branch: a named, parallel line of the work. Branch the lede to try the bolder version. Branch the ending. Branches render as their own tracks on the Timeline, and your main draft is untouched no matter how far a branch runs.
⌘⇧MMerging
When a branch proves itself, press ⌘⇧M to merge it back. The merge is three-way — roono compares both versions against the Moment where they split, paragraph by paragraph, keyed on the stable IDs every paragraph carries.
The binding rule: conflicts always surface to you. When both sides changed the same paragraph, roono shows the two versions and you choose. Content is never auto-resolved behind your back.
A MERGE, STEP BY STEPopen ↓
- On the branch, press ⌘⇧M and choose the target — usually main.
- roono lines up both versions against the branch point and walks you through the paragraphs that differ.
- Paragraphs only one side changed flow in quietly. Paragraphs both sides changed stop you, side by side:
March’s minute book was one page short of its own index.
The minute book was one page short — and page seven was the one that named the contractors.
You pick — main, branch, or edit the two into a third version. The merge itself becomes a Moment.
No trapdoorsRestore & the append-only rule
Restoring is just selecting an earlier Moment and continuing from it — the newer Moments stay on the track, so even a “restore” loses nothing. Branches you abandon can bearchived out of view, but no code path in roono physically deletes history. That is a deliberate, structural choice: the day you need the sentence you deleted in a panic six months ago, it is still there.
The worst case in roono is a branch you archive. Write the reckless version; the Timeline is holding the careful one. Next: fasten your claims to their evidence — and meet the gate that checks them.