How to see local history changes in Visual Studio Code?

I think there is no out-of-the-box support for that in VS Code.

You can install a plugin to give you similar functionality. Eg.:

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=micnil.vscode-checkpoints

Or the more famous:

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=xyz.local-history

Some details may need to be configured: The VS Code search gets confused sometimes because of additional folders created by this type of plugins. You can configure it to ignore such folders or change their locations (adding such folders to your .gitignore file also solves this problem).

I built an extension called Checkpoints, an alternative to Local History. Checkpoints has support for viewing history for all files (that has checkpoints) in the tree view, not just the currently active file. There are some other minor differences aswell, but overall they are pretty similar.

Basic Functionality

• Automatically saved local edit history is available with the Local History extension.
• Manually saved local edit history is available with the Checkpoints extension (this is the IntelliJ equivalent to adding tags to the local history).

Advanced Functionality

• None of the extensions mentioned above support edit history when a file is moved or renamed.
• The extensions above only support edit history. They do not support move/delete history, for example, like IntelliJ does.

Open Request

If you'd like to see this feature added natively, along with all of the advanced functionality, I'd suggest upvoting the open GitHub issue here.