autosave

autosave

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.