It is not so much th need for the feture as it for the users to see how it might work and benefit the. for instance SW thinks that click click click is not workable or at least useful.

Of course for Photoshop no one thinks there is anything wrong with click click click but the history panel records every pen click, PS also has a limit to the number of history states it records.

Then there is the ability to fill a document or section with an opacity of the history and the ability to fade an action you have just completed. So it is not so much the need for the feature as it is for the users to see the potential and the way it might work. One the feature is defined so that say those posting here can comprehend it better then they have always embraced the feature but the question remains is that it is not defined well and the goal of those who feel they need it require.

Here is what I have proposed in the past something akin to the Appearance panel  in which you can add strokes, fills and effects and turn them on and off at will. So my proposal is object oriented and each element is treated as an object, it own little mini document and in say the appearance panel you can turn on history of course in order to work the way Illustrator writes this history has to be different from illustrator. I cannot actually write the steps it normally would do it has to work more like LR which unlike Photoshop never actually does anything to the file just to the preview and only when outputted or export it does it actually do anything to the document itself. It is all just mathematics, like O Foto.

If Illustrator would work that way then memory issues and the like would be less problematic as well and so would file size.

now saying illustrator doesn't work that way is not a good argument as the way that illustrator does work is a source of frustration for many users they need a more hardware friendly way to work.

History on an object by object basis and the ability to turn on and off states independent of other objects can be a very useful way.

The argument about the memory issue for such a feature is mute since this feature has to be implemented as a mathematical aray of information and not executed processes which will eliminate the need for hugh amounts of memory.

And since you can turn on and off appearances, strokes, fills gradients and the like this should be possible for object oriented history.

Perhaps it should be an enhancement of the appearance panel.

BTW if i recall I think some of the user here who do not see the use of this feature may have been against the need to turn on and off appearances.

I do not think you understand for instance in LightRoom you can spot out dust a hundred times and you can undo to your hearts content as well as redo, but you can always delete a healed or clone spot instance without effecting and other spotted area. Even after you relaunch, the actually function is never actually performed except on the screen the info to perform the function is only performed on output.

It would take thousands of such spot brush incidents effect the size of the file significantly.

Same for cropping the image it is never actually done and can always be changed, adjustments to the perspective of the image content as well.

So if you did this in Illustrator essentially you would have a blank document except when you view it on screen or preview it on the desktop and when you output it otherwise you have a blank document.

First of all a history panel like Photoshop's works exactly that way and works with the pen tool as well, so you can take a look at Photoshop to see how that works.

Secondly you clearly chose not to read what I wrote or failed to understand it, I cannot make you read it or understand it.

If you have a LR has a way of removing edits that have been made regards of when they were made and regardless of the order they were made. You can undo as well while the session is still open, that works the way you understand undos and history but undoing a step or removing an edit can also be undone.

What Illustrator can and cannot do is quite frankly something i think you do not know or understand, I am proposing a way that might be explored and  from my experience putting the feature up for consideration requires that you show how it can benefit and how it might be accomplished. If the suggestion rings a bell with the team or at least one or two members of the team it seems they are able to do something about it.

Since you cannot see the possibility and understand what I am proposing I have to say it is good fortune that you are not on the team as very little would be accomplished since you have always taken this same position of not seeing the possibility and have always been against such feature request, for instance multiple artboards that can be used as multiple pages,which turn out to be ver,y useful for many AI uses even if it is not useful to you.

However on the other hand your reluctance to embrace a new thought is very helpful in that it usually contrasts with the idea at hand and often shows how the old thinking is not as clear as one would think and the idea becomes more practical.

The team may eventually see the possibility of this feature and find a way and I personally think if they do find this way it will change Illustrator dramatically and it function on very large files as well as as on files not so large and will have less memory problems or none at all.

I think this will come about, regardless of what you understand.

A History palette is a raster program's workaround for the kind of practically unlimited Undo which is practical in an object-based drawing or page assembly program, but which is not practical in a raster program.

I use most all of the mainstream vector programs, started with this stuff in the mid 80s, and have never had a desire for a Photoshop-like History palette.

Listing in a palette every selection change, transformation, or path change in a vector program is just silly. You can quickly back up to such changes using Undo, because you're not rebuilding a large raster image with every edit. If you think you're going to have to revert to a point farther back than a couple dozen Undos, as when you've reached a major "milestone" in your artwork or design that you intend to follow with a doubtful experiment, just do a Save, Save As... or a Save A Copy.... and then proceed.

To experience just how silly this would be, all you have to do is use Photoshop for a few minutes like you would use Illustrator. For example: You're working along, making large, sweeping, destructive changes in a Photoshop paiinting. You have an idea that may or may not work out. Having that History palette hanging out there affords you ability to experiment for a few steps and then change your mind. It lets you do a little bit of destructive (which all raster edits are) experimentation for a few steps. But further suppose that the next few steps of your experiment entails drawing a vector path which you'll use as a selection. It is very easy in Photoshop to very quickly "use up" that handful of mini-saves listed in the History palette. If you do, and then decide, "Nah, let's nix that filter I did a few steps back"--it's still long gone and there's no going back unless you had done a Save, Save As... or Save A Copy....or unless you had applied that filter as an Adjustment Layer (i.e.;--are you catching this?--something that can be treated as an object).

So Photoshop's History palette still doesn't free the user from having to plan ahead and do incremental saves. Anyone who thinks it does is destined for disaster.

In a program like Illustrator, however, everything is an object. Even raster effects are not destructive. They are like objects. They can be deleted any time you want, without even touching any of the subsequent operations you have performed since applying them. Moreover, in an object-based program, even destructive changes can be "mini-saved" right there inside the document. You can make a duplicate of that Symbol before you rasterize it. You can make a copy of that text object and drag it off the artboard before you convert it to paths.

Just a little forethought goes a long way. Egads, you should try a little database design. Changes to records in a shared database are "done deals" as soon as they are committed. There is no "going back" except by reverting to a backup copy.

In other words, organized work methods always employ a practical measure of planning, even in a raster program that has a history palette. This whole argument about the "need" for a history palette in object-based programs is just one manifestation of that fact. The "pitfalls" of not planning (i.e.; not thinking a little ahead) in this regard is parallel to similar user failures: Not using Layers effectively to organize the object stack, failing to define colors as Global (a particularly stupid AI-specific issue), failure to use Graphic Styles, Symbols, Saved Selections, Paragraph and Character Styles, Templates, etc., etc. You don't have to use those features, but failing to do so will cost you eventually. And having a silly history palette won't prevent it.

You can irreversably "paint yourself into a corner" in any program by not using it right. That's as true in a raster progam that provides the mere convenience of a few steps being listed in a history palette as in any other. Vector drawing programs don't need "history palette's becasue most edits are not destructive, and vector undos take up comparitively very little memory.

If it's really that much trouble to do incremental, serialized milestone saves, a macro or script could be easily devised to do that. But no, a vector drawing program does not need a silly history palette recording every click or drag of every anchorPoint or handle.

And something being "long requested" or even "requested by a majority" doesn't make it wise. Some of the most vocal requestors are users with very little experience, and majorities are quite often just wrong.

JET

How is this:

Pen Tool click

Pen Tool click

Pen Tool click

Pen Tool click

Pen Tool click

Pen Tool click

Pen Tool click

Pen Tool drag

Pen Tool click

Pen Tool click

Pen Tool drag

Pen Tool click

Pen Tool click

Pen Tool click

Pen Tool click

Pen Tool click

Pen Tool click

Pen Tool click

Any different than this:

Brush Tool

Brush Tool

Brush Tool

Brush Tool

Brush Tool

Brush Tool

Brush Tool

Brush Tool

Brush Tool

Brush Tool

Brush Tool

Brush Tool

Brush Tool

Brush Tool

???

I know I know. PS is non-linear, AI is not. I understand the whole linear history with AI and non-linear history with PS, and that's fine. Non-linear history aside, I find it extremely useful in PS to be able to quickly click back tens or hundreds of steps in history, essentially using the history panel as a list of undo/redo. In fact I use this far more often than non-linear history brush painting. What's wrong with adding this to AI? A visual list of LINEAR history steps that you can click forward or backward on without having to press Command/Ctrl+Z 147 times. How is this NOT useful?

Very few programs have non-linear history capability like Photoshop, but I can think of a handful of programs that provide a visual list of linear history steps with the ability to jump to any step in the list. I find this an incredibly useful tool and so do many others, which is why there are so many people baffled as to why Illustrator doesn't have this very common and very useful feature. Just search for "Illustrator History Panel?" and you get forum after forum post of users looking for this feature.

If Microsoft Word has this feature, then I don't want hear excuse after excuse about how Illustrator would have to be turned upside down to add this feature. That's all it is; an excuse. There is absolutely no reason it can't be added to every Adobe product. They may not be as powerful as Photoshop's history panel, but that wouldn't make it any less useful.

I know that. I said I know that in my post. I knew that before I ever starting searching for Illustrator's History Panel. I never expected to be able to edit history non-linearly in Illustrator, nor am I asking why it can't be done. FORGET about non-linear history in Photoshop vs. Illustrator, that's not what I'm asking. The questions is, how is it NOT useful to be able to instantly jump around a visual list of undo/redo steps without having to press Command+Z hundreds of times? Rhetorical question. It IS useful. That's why the feature exists in many other software packages. So the real question is; why don't Illustrator (and other Adobe products) have this feature???

İf its a unnecessary use of Illustrator resources, then why did they give the feature to Photoshop and not Illustrator?

Scott believes that a vector program is not a workable app  for a history panel.

Even though Fireworksb has one that might serve as  model.

I admit illustrator is quite different than FW but I think the way you use FW  history panel to create an action

and the ability of Illustrator to record actions indicates that it is possible.

Yes Scott is mistaken o n this issueandsimple cannot picturw hoq this would work. But once Illustrator has it he will champion the feature

I never claimed it was needed. There's no reason why ANY feature is NEEDED. I don't NEED Illustrator or even a computer to draw. I can create art with a yellow #2 pencil with a pink eraser on a piece of printer paper.

Having a history panel is a "nice to have" additional feature that I would use if it was there, it is not needed. I can't think of any feature that has been added to Adobe products in the last ten years that was NEEDED. However there are tons of features that have been added which are very useful.

A valid reason why you or anyone else would argue AGAINST additional features that would not affect your preferencial workflow, has yet to be posted.

Thank you Chris. That is exactly why a history panel is very useful--because it saves time. It is also precicely why a history panel exists not only in all of Adobe's other products, but also in many other programs as well. Microsoft Word has it for f&%# sake!

I would also like to add that in addition to a huge time saver, using a history panel is a much more precise way of working with the history states of your document. When you use ctrl/cmd+z or click undo, it is a blind way of moving back a step, and the more steps you need to go back the more obvious this becomes. You essentially have to eagle eye your document and watch for any subtle changes you may have made as you press undo numerous times to get to the history state you want to be at. As artists, the majority of changes that we make are very subtle, so blindly landing on the history state you want to be on is way more difficult than it needs to be. With a visual list of past steps, moving back a large number of steps becomes very easy to navigate.

It is also much easier to toggle between two states of your document that are many steps apart. For example if you made a bunch of changes to your document and you want to quickly toggle back and forth between the new state of your document and the state it was in before you made all those changes, or any other previous state, a history panel makes this an easy process. Click once. Yeah sure you could save different versios of your document, make your new changes and load up an old version, but that would bring us back to the time argument. A history panel makes this process much faster. You also would never save a new file for EVERY step you do. With a history panel, you don't need to. You can easily go back to any step you want.

I too created a forum account just to respond to this thread because I was baffeled that people refused to look outside their little boxes to see how a history panel is useful, even to go as far as arguing against adding a history panel to Illustrator, or any new feature for that matter. Of course the answer is obvious now; It's not that people like Scott W can't see or refuse to see why a history panel is useful, it's just that they like to argue for the sake of arguing. There's no logic or valid points brought up by these type of people, they're just trolling away. So for anyone else who stumbles on this thread wondering where the hell the history panel is in Illustrator, I would suggest you submit a new feature request to Adobe as myself and many others have done. Then hopefully if we can outnumber the aging douchebags who argue against progressive change, we will see this very useful feature in a future version of Illustrator.

I find this whole conversation a little strange. I know it's outdated, but I'd thought I'd throw another comment into the fray. I'm still getting my feet wet with both Photoshop and Illustrator. I don't really understand how non-linear editing is used in Photoshop nor do I think I have ever made use of it. The reason I went looking for a history panel in Illustrator today is for the same reason I use it in Photoshop. Truly, as others have mentioned, any software feature can be measured in lazyness, it is largely a convenience factor. However, the history panel provides one benefit that not amount of Ctrl-Z can.

The history panel is functionallly distinct because it skips directly from any one state in history to another witout steps in between. I frequently use this as a simple means of staging my edits, comparing versions to see if I am happy with the results or not. For example, if I have been selecting a font, and picking and choosing through multiple options, I can review any historical steps and quickly alternate between them. Now of course, I could attain this functionality with other combined efforts, like saving multiple copies of a file, or recreating my steps to queue up the ones I wish to compare. There will always be a question of convenience, and perhaps my usage pattern is a-typical, but I know that I would be positively impacted by its inclusion in this product.