autosave [LWN.net]

autosave

Posted Jun 14, 2022 23:59 UTC (Tue) by marcH (subscriber, #57642)
In reply to: autosave by jschrod
Parent article: Per-file OOM badness

Of course making copy seems very "primitive" compared to proper version control.

Yet a copy may be faster and more convenient if it's only for a very short term and throw-away safety before doing something quick and a bit "dangerous". Combined with autosave it's also safer than holding back a manual save (no loss on crash or user error) and barely more effort. It's not mutually exclusive with proper version control.

The best tool for the job and manual saves offer very little advantages in very few situations.

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autosave

Posted Jun 15, 2022 0:27 UTC (Wed) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link] (4 responses)

I have to apologize for my comment that may be interpreted as a snide remark. It was not meant as that -- though, in hindsight, it looks like it does.

Of course, making explicit copies (or intermediate explicit copies) is a most valuable tool. I use it often, myself. Involving git in that moment is too much work afterwards, frankly.

My comment was a reaction to the opinion of pebolle that "making explicit intermediate copies" is a troll argument. Which it is not at all -- and I think, we agree on that. It was a spontaneous reaction and not formulated adequately, please accept my apologies.

What irks me in this discussion: There are really experienced folks who thinks that the difference between autosave and an explicit save is not necessary; any change is immediately applied to the original document. (I experience that with Google Docs, and it's horrible.) In our software development activities, we have now version control systems that differentiate between commit and push and allow rebasing in between. Do you remember SVN? A bad commit happened and you cannot change it because it was immediately pushed to the centreal repository. WTF? Today we have better tools.

How can anybody who is used to such a fine and flexible software development workflow, as exemplified by git, think that it's not necessary to have the same control over the change process of one's document content?

autosave

Posted Jun 15, 2022 1:40 UTC (Wed) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link] (2 responses)

Some people here think hardly anyone benefits from explicit save and that hardly anyone wants it. I'm not convinced anyone here knows any more than I do about what everyone wants (and I assume I'm far from alone in highly valuing explicit save), but here is some evidence in the form of expensive engineering that has been done to support explicit save that explicit savers are legion:

Products that autosave usually provide a way to turn it off. And they usually tell you (warn you) that they are autosaving.

And here's a gem I recently discovered in Microsoft Word: My editing session got interrupted. When I restarted, Word said to me, "I automatically saved some of your work since you last saved. Would you like to keep that?" I said Hell no because I didn't know what half-baked change of mine it might have saved, but on other occasions I surely would have said yes.

Making a copy before starting a change and doing explicit version control with something like Git is impractical. I sometimes hit ctl-S (Emacs ctl-X ctl-S) multiple times a minute.

autosave

Posted Jun 15, 2022 8:43 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> And here's a gem I recently discovered in Microsoft Word: My editing session got interrupted. When I restarted, Word said to me, "I automatically saved some of your work since you last saved. Would you like to keep that?" I said Hell no because I didn't know what half-baked change of mine it might have saved, but on other occasions I surely would have said yes.

That's been there a while.

The *problem* with auto-save is that I can no longer "quit without saving"! That is functionality I sometimes *desire*, even before I start my edit. Sometimes I want to play before starting work in earnest. I can no longer do that ...

Cheers,
Wol

autosave

Posted Jun 16, 2022 22:29 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

> Making a copy before starting a change and doing explicit version control with something like Git is impractical. I sometimes hit ctl-S (Emacs ctl-X ctl-S) multiple times a minute.

Automate it! (In particular, see 'magit-wip-mode'.)

autosave

Posted Jun 15, 2022 8:21 UTC (Wed) by pebolle (guest, #35204) [Link]

> My comment was a reaction to the opinion of pebolle that "making explicit intermediate copies" is a troll argument.

My beef was the wording of marcH's comment. It seemed chosen to trigger the recipient - whom I know to be polite and focussed on the subject at hand - into replying over the top too.

(For the record: I actually have no opinion on the pros and cons of autosave.)