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P4 for Visual Studio Documentation | 2025.2

# View file history with Time-lapse View

Time-lapse View provides an interactive graphical representation of a file’s history, showing when lines were added, changed, and deleted, who made the changes, and when the changes were made. Time-lapse View enables you to browse forward and back through changes dynamically, enabling you to locate changes of interest. Detail panes at the bottom of the window provide more information about selected chunks.

## Display Time-lapse View

To open the Time-lapse View window, do any of the following:

Right-click in the Solution Explorer and select Views > Time-lapse View.

Go to Files > P4 and select Views > Time-lapse view.

In the Submitted Changelist dialog, right-click a file and select Time-lapse View.

Time-lapse View is a P4V component. When you are working in Time-lapse View, you are working in P4V.

## Control the display

The following options are available on the toolbar:

Mode | Determines how many revisions are displayed. Options are: Single revision: one revision at a time is displayed Incremental diffs: two adjacent revisions are displayed, with changes highlighted Multiple revisions: a range of revisions is displayed, with changes highlighted
Content Range | Specifies the starting and ending revision displayed.
Scale | Specifies the unit used: changelist number, date, or revision number.
User | Toggles display of the user that made the change.
Aging | Displays color coding to indicate how recently a change was entered. The darker the shading, the more recent the change.
Line Numbers | Toggles display of line numbers.
Lifetimes | Toggles display of lifetimes, which are graphics that indicate by their width how long the adjacent chunk of text has been in the file.
Branch History | Toggles inclusion of branching (integration) history.
Find | Search text
Go To | In single revision mode, go to specified line number.
Go to Next diff | Go to next modification
Go to Previous diff | Go to previous modification
Line Ending | Specifies how line endings and whitespace are treated to determine differences

The slider enables you to browse rapidly through file revisions. The appearance of the slider corresponds to the mode you select. The unit by which the slider advances is specified by the mode you select (date, changelist, or revision). The revision, date, or changelist number is displayed under the slider.

Mode | Slider Appearance | Description
--- | --- | ---
Single revision |  | Move it to the right to display the next file revision or left to display the previous revision.
Incremental diffs |  | Move it to the right to display the next pair of file revisions, or left to display the previous pair of file revisions.
Multiple revisions |  | Move the right and left halves separately, to control how many revisions are displayed.

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