Undo for Shiny, and the three problems that make it interesting

Shiny

packages

Shiny has no undo. Adding it means solving three problems: restoring a widget you have never heard of, stopping the echo loop, and a bug that only R’s lazy evaluation could produce.

Author

Tanmay Chanda

Published

August 27, 2026

Shiny has bookmarking. It has reactlog. It has no undo.

That is strange when you stop to think about it. Undo is in every text editor, every drawing program, every spreadsheet. People arrive at a dashboard already expecting Ctrl+Z to work. Then they change a filter by mistake, and there is no way back except to remember what the filter used to say.

I wrote rewind to close that gap. It is on CRAN now.

install.packages("rewind")

library(shiny)
library(rewind)

server <- function(input, output, session) {
  rewind_enable()   # this is the whole setup

  output$plot <- renderPlot(plot_for(input$region, input$year))
}

Ctrl+Z now steps backwards through the choices the user made. Ctrl+Shift+Z and Ctrl+Y step forwards. There is a pair of buttons and a clickable history rail if you want them.

The package itself is small. The interesting part is not the feature. It is the three problems you meet when you try to build it, and I think each one is worth reading about even if you never install this.

Problem one: restoring a widget you have never heard of

To undo, you have to put an old value back into a widget. The obvious way is a lookup table:

sliderInput   -> updateSliderInput
selectInput   -> updateSelectInput
dateInput     -> updateDateInput
# ... and so on, forever

That table is never finished. It breaks the first time somebody uses a widget from a package you have never seen. Every input package on CRAN would need an entry, and new ones appear all the time.

So rewind does not have one.

Every Shiny input registers an input binding against its DOM element. That is how Shiny itself talks to widgets. Each binding exposes setValue() or receiveMessage(). The client-side code looks the binding up and calls it:

var binding = $el.data("shiny-input-binding");

if (typeof binding.setValue === "function") {
  binding.setValue(el, value);
} else {
  binding.receiveMessage(el, { value: value });
}

That is the entire restore path. It works for third-party inputs for free, because it uses the same mechanism updateSliderInput() uses underneath.

The general lesson: when a framework already has a registry, use the registry. Do not build a parallel one you have to maintain.

Problem two: the echo

Here is the failure mode that kills most attempts at this.

Restoring an input sends the value to the browser. The browser sets the widget. The widget reports the new value back to the server. The server sees an input change, and records a new history entry.

That is a loop. Undo creates a history entry, which you can then undo, which creates another entry.

Two mechanisms stop it, and they overlap on purpose.

Dedup. The history refuses to accept a state identical to the current one. A restore moves the pointer to state S before the echo arrives, so when the echo turns up it matches the present exactly and is dropped. This handles the common case with no coordination at all.

An expectation guard. The controller remembers what it asked the browser to apply, and ignores intermediate states until either the echo matches or a timeout expires. This covers the case dedup misses: several inputs arriving in separate flushes, producing a half-applied state that is not identical to anything.

Neither depends on guessing how long the round trip takes. That is what makes it reliable rather than usually-correct.

Problem three: a bug that only R could give you

This one is my favourite, and it is the reason I think this post is worth writing for an R audience rather than a JavaScript one.

The capture observer looked like this:

shiny::observe({
  ctrl$note(ctrl$snapshot())
}, domain = session)

snapshot() reads every tracked input. Reading them inside observe() is what registers the reactive dependencies, so the observer re-runs whenever anything changes. Standard Shiny.

note() begins like this:

note = function(state) {
  if (private$.paused) return(invisible(FALSE))
  # ...
}

Now put those together with R’s lazy argument evaluation.

While capture is paused, note() returns at its first line. It never touches state. R evaluates arguments only when they are used - so ctrl$snapshot() never runs. And if snapshot() never runs, nothing reads the reactive values, so the observer registers no dependencies.

An observer with no dependencies is never invalidated. It never runs again. Not after rewind_resume(), not ever. A single rewind_pause() before the first flush silently killed undo for the rest of the session.

The fix is one line, and it looks like it does nothing:

shiny::observe({
  state <- ctrl$snapshot()   # forces the reads
  ctrl$note(state)
}, domain = session)

Assigning to a local variable forces evaluation, the reads happen unconditionally, and the dependencies stay alive across pause and resume.

I find this one interesting because both halves are things R programmers know. Lazy evaluation is on page one. Reactive dependencies come from reading reactives during execution. It is the interaction that bites, and the symptom - “undo stops working, but only sometimes” - points nowhere near the cause.

The practical bit: one drag is one step

Dragging a slider fires dozens of input events. Undoing them one at a time would be useless, so changes that land within coalesce_ms of each other become a single entry. One drag is one undo step, not forty.

When time is the wrong boundary - a “reset filters” button that changes four inputs at once - you can say so:

observeEvent(input$reset, {
  rewind_step(label = "Reset filters", {
    updateSelectInput(session, "region", selected = "All")
    updateSliderInput(session, "year", value = c(2018, 2026))
    updateCheckboxInput(session, "active_only", value = FALSE)
  })
})

One entry, with a label a human wrote.

State you keep yourself is invisible until you register it:

state <- reactiveValues(pinned = character(0))
rewind_track(state, fields = "pinned")

Modules work: call rewind_enable() once at the top level and inputs inside modules are captured under their namespaced names and restored correctly.

What undo does not do

Undo restores state. It does not undo side effects. If an observer wrote to a database when the filter changed, stepping back changes the filter, not the database row. That is worth being clear about before you put this in front of users who might assume otherwise.

Try it

install.packages("rewind")
shiny::runApp(system.file("examples/demo", package = "rewind"))

Documentation: https://tenmeh.github.io/rewind/
Source: https://github.com/tenmeh/rewind
CRAN: https://cran.r-project.org/package=rewind

Issues and pull requests are welcome. I am especially interested in reports from anyone running it inside a heavily modularised app, since that is where the interesting edge cases will be.