Slashdot Mirror
Goodbye, Ctrl-S
An anonymous reader writes "'Save your work!' — This was a rallying cry for an entire generation of workers and students. The frequency and unpredictability of software crashes, power outages, and hardware failures made it imperative to constantly hit that save button. But in 2014? Not so much. My documents are automatically saved (with versioning) every time I make a change. My IDE commits code changes automatically. Many webforms will save drafts of whatever data I'm entering. Heck, even the games I play have an autosave feature. It's an interesting change — the young generation will grow up with an implicit trust that whatever they type into a computer will stay there. Maybe this is my generation's version of: 'In my day, we had to get up and walk across the room to change the channel on the TV!' In any case, it has some subtle but interesting effects on how people write, play, and create. No longer do we have to have constant interruptions to worry about whether our changes are saved — but at the same time, we don't have that pause to take a moment and reflect on what we've written. I'm sure we've all had moments where our hands hover over a save/submit button before changing our minds and hammering the backspace key. Maybe now we'll have to think before we write."
I've been using computers for over 30 years and have never once used this keystroke.
When it stopped meaning "Suspend output to terminal" along with it's partner CTRL-Q.
In-Band serial flow control ftw!
G.
a text editor that is so error prone that *needs* to autosave constantly("continuously"). Or software in general, for that matter.
Looking for people to chat about multicopters, coding, music. skype: gtsiros
Your material will be saved to the cloud where the NSA computers can check it and make sure you're not doing anything illegal. But please just ignore the prying eyes, citizen, and get back to work for the Man. After all, he owns the NSA now.
Truly it is the year of the Linux Desktop. Long live :w
is how do revert to older versions? I use a program that saves every change so while a crash would not result in lost work I can't revert to an earlier version unless I save a copy first before editing. Fortunately I use another program that saves a copy every time I use Carl-s so I can roll back from its copies.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
TFA doesn't mention this and, if the summary writer meant "commit" as in version control commit, this would be a killer bug in the whole process.
Version control is not meant to be used as a backup, every commit should be deliberate, reviewed and well explained in the comments. Vide the post mortem of the heartbleed bug (or many other similar ones).
Surely you mean C-x C-s.
Finding God in a Dog
...control-S (XOFF) was used to pause the scrolling on a "dumb" CRT terminal. I don't think I have ever used it to save a document.
Systems I care about (i.e. anything I use for "real work") are on UPSes. If the hardware or software is unstable enough that it crashes unexpectedly more often than once every couple of months (give or take), I fix/replace the hardware or start looking for alternative software to accomplish the same task.
That's honestly the first thing I thought of. "Saving a document" to me is "Esc-:w".
...but it's being eaten...by some...Linux or something...
I'm busy F4'ing.
Trolling is a art,
What if I don't want to save my changes?
"You can use the 'undo' command they say..."
Yes but the undo command isn't persistent between applications, much less a power failure.
You haven't solved anything, you've merely shifted the problem.
Sometimes, I don't want to save. I will open a document with the explicit purpose of making changes that I don't want saved. Even Gmail's autosave has burned me pretty badly. I spent an hour typing out a very long email. Toward the end of it, something happened, and the whole body of text was gone. I'm still not really sure if it was a keyboard shortcut I inadvertently triggered, browser bug, or what. But I just thought "no biggie... I'll just go back to the auto-saved version". So I open up the autosaved version, and the latest auto-save happened AFTER the email body was deleted. So much for autosave @#$!#$@!!!!
Esc-ZZ
This sounded so familiar to me, but I can't believe it has been over eight years ago. I must be remembering a similar story posted much more recently.
Back in the day, I/O was dreadfully slow. Think about 5 1/4" and 3 1/2" floppy disks and slow hard disks, and how long it could take to save a document. I can still hear the clunking and whirring in my head as the little activity LED blinks and the operating system grinds to a halt.
Now, with faster HDDs and even better SSDs, making "save" a separate, user-triggered operation doesn't make much sense. And with a jillion cores, you can easily offload the CPU work to do the saving to another thread so the UI isn't interrupted. Look at iOS - how many apps have a "save" button at all? It's expressly discouraged from the Human Interface Guidelines, and iOS users have been happily plugging along without it for years.
I think the real shocker is why applications still have a 3 1/2" floppy disk as the save icon. It's just an anachronism now.
:w
"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde
At First National Bank and Trust.
Excuses that no longer work:
My floppy disc isn't working
My computer blue screened before I saved
My e-mail was down
I don't know why your computer can't read that format
Every excuse I ever used to get a day's reprieve could not work now.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Derr, nevermind. You were saying the same thing. The - threw me off.
"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde
Yeah, that was my initial thought too. But I've already come to terms with the fact that I'm ancient, so it didn't really bother me! ;-)
Once upon a time in a far away land I was pounding away at my Apple ][. I forgot to save and lost an hour and a half of work. That was the best mistake I ever made. Since then I have always saved, made backup copies, sent the text to myself on email, written a CD/DVD, saved to a thumb drive, and so on. An hour and a half was a very cheap loss to have, if I was forever safe thereafter.
Autosave still has not cured me. I will still CTRL-S every few lines. Even with autosave on CAD I will still do other saves. Still, my paranoia does save me.
Not so long ago, I discovered that several years of engineering files had been vanished. We had paper copies but still that loss was annoying.Turns out that I had made a backup of that file set and it was found in my home cache of "work" disks. I slept better.
No longer do we have to have constant interruptions to worry about whether our changes are saved
Why would you interrupt your flow of work to save a document? That doesn't make any sense whatsoever. What I got into the habit of doing was hitting Ctrl-S after each thought. The thought was then saved and I thinking about what to write next anyway. Autosave doesn't know when I actually want to commit my changes and it could happen in the middle of an edit (say cut and paste to move some text around). If I lost power at that time I would rather have the unedited version of the document than the one with my precious text cut out of it and then lost in the event of a power failure.
Apple users don't Control, they Command you insensitive clod!
... when GNU Emacs had auto-saving and backup versioning at any keystroke granularity you liked thirty years ago. Next we celebrate the boon of split screen editing.
Games that autosave only on checkpoints is a hangover from old consoles that didn't have the memory to allows gamers to save when they wanted to. Why this horrible restriction continues to perpetuate to modern PC games is beyond me. It's a throwback and it's annoying.
I can hear some people saying "It forces suspense in the game! You don't know when the next safe place is!". If you want that kind of suspense, let the game auto save for you. Personally if supper is ready I don't want to have to tell my wife "Wait, I know there must be an auto save waypoint around here somewhere, hold on while I play for another 5 - 10 minutes looking for it!" I want to hit cntl-s, quit, and go have supper.
Is it so hard to put 'save when you want' in to a game?
end-of-rant
For public work docs we put together. I was trying to hit "Alt+F, S" to save everything for quite a while.
I personally don't like the change because not every piece of software behaves that way (yet), and that leads to confusion.
I also like having control over what is saved and when for a reason. Maybe I don't want some server having every thought I've ever had (and then deleted later because it was a bad idea, such as an angry email you never sent) stored somewhere in "Big Data". Imagine the psychological profile that someone could build about you with everything you ever typed anywhere in any Google product, Facebook, Twitter, etc...
With that said, I get why most people don't have such paranoid thoughts. It's all about convenience.
Many years ago, I lost some changes in a vi clone named "stevie". The real vi saved your changes automatically by the simple (and at the time necessary) method of using a file to store your edit buffer, but stevie used an in-memory edit buffer. After it losing enough changes from that, I decided to write my own vi clone, "elvis", which also used a file to store the edit buffer. This was very handy in the early days of Minix (predecessor to Linux) which had only a 64K address space per process -- it allowed you to edit text files larger than 64K, oooooh!
Obviously this guy isn't a fan of Bethesda games, if he thinks so highly of autosave.
Just wait until you lose an hour of progress because you didn't save before getting smoked by a high-level troll at the bottom of that dungeon.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Why would anyone want to autocommit possibly broken code?
ctrl-S is still alive and well and suspending most things.
...passes to Moses...SCORE!
Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 1 hour, 47 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
Did this just happen?
Ctrl-S/Ctrl-Q still work in my terminal windows. I'm not sure how useful it is as my response time can be slow enough that it doesn't usually let me stop the text display in time when I see something I want to take a closer look at. (Setting up a whopping big scrollback memory helps with that, though.)
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Undo levels to zero, no saving. Live in the moment, on the edge. No turning back, it's all in.
I think there might be an Eclipse option. We had a new guy once who had some IDE auto-committing. He had a ridiculous number of completely uninformative commits early on. Very quickly the top item on his task list became "Figure out how to disable auto-commit"
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
Jesus and Buddha sit down for a typing contest. Both are given a lengthy paper document, and have to type it into their respective computers. The contest starts, and they're neck-and-neck the whole way. When they're both almost done, a lightning bolt comes down from the sky, and both computers crash. Who wins the contest? Jesus, of course. Jesus saves.
Only if you're finished. If you're still working but want to save your progress, :w is what you want.
I was writing a long winded post about how the days of 'ctrl-s'ing every 10 seconds are finally gone, but I lost it all after my computer crashed.
Jesus and Satan were constantly bickering over who could use the computer better. Finally, Saint Peter got tired of it and challenged them to have a day long compute-off to settle once and for all who could use the computer better.
The day of the contest came. Both Jesus and Satan spent all day writing documents and creating spreadsheets. Many words were processed, and many numbers were crunched.
Twenty three hours and fifty minutes into the competition, both computers crashed. Satan began cursing at all of the work that he lost, but Jesus just calmly restarted his computer. Jesus won the competition, because Jesus saves.
Thanks!, I'll be here all week. Don't forget to tip the waitress.
Many webforms will save drafts of whatever data I'm entering
But not slashdot.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Maybe now we'll have to think before we write.
The very act of externalizing something is part of the writing process. The idea that one who might think it all out and then type/code/compose/whatever a perfectly formed document/program/concerto/whatever only really exists in the imaginary Mozart that lives in Peter Schaffer's mind.
Besides, I prefer to save my work at defined points. Just because the system can recreate what I was doing where I left off before that dead battery/power failure/segfault/system crash/emergency phone call doesn't necessarily mean I can.
I am not a crackpot.
I hate autosave. Its one of the first things I turn off in any editor.
Over many years I have developed an optimal workflow of trying changes and only saving when I'm completely happy with it, so by not saving I can easily go back to the last good version.
Autosave that saves at regular time periods or whatever totally ruins that. I don't want earlier versions automatically overwritten, especially with work-in-progress changes, nor do I want multiple versions saved so I then have the hassle of figuring out *which* version to go back to, and possibly on-top all the manual housekeeping of regularly having to manually clear out multiple old versions.
I totally had first post on this one, but I found out I actually have to click both a preview button and submit button for it to save to this forum.
Maybe they work for Adobe?
Perhaps you've heard of a thing called a power outage. I just had one last night.
Your laptop's battery or your desktop's UPS should have kept the machine running long enough for an orderly shutdown.
since it was Commodore-s on GEOS.
Mostly random stuff.
...but no we have automobile correct on our spilling.
Ok, seriously, what we are seeing is just another incremental step in mass-computing. One of the many millions of cool things that have happened since the beginning of computing.
Years ago (Pre-Fidonet), one of the almost daily "Big Things" was that you could actually have a "Disk Operating System" where you didn't have to type call -151, then c600g to actually load a program. No Play on Tape. Just turn the computer on. It was cool.
If we go further back, no punch cards (before my time), and no acoustic couplers (also before my time). Must've been cool!
Still, management tools aside, if only there was a switch/router operating system that maintained automatic revisions at the command-line.
Autosave without revert bit me years ago. Before I could afford a "real" laptop (which cost several times as much then as they do now), I was trying to use NewtonWorks on an Apple MessagePad 2000 as a substitute. I lost work when I accidentally removed a lot of text and it decided to autosave. Worse, that program had only one level of undo, with Cmd+Z toggling between "Undo" and "Redo". That doesn't help if you make a mistake and then do something else after your mistake.
By shopping wisely and using coupons!
It didn't even occur to me that there would be no auto-save until my character died about an hour into the game. I don't think I own any game from the past several years that does not auto-save.
Jesus saves!
And takes half damage from the fireball.
When I started in the industry, I used an ancient mainframe code editor, and it "committed" after every line and it had no undo. Uphill through the snow, both ways, I tell ya! At least now as we come back around the wheel to auto-save, we have the chance to do it better.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Jesus saves, Moses invests, Budha lives on the interest. - the rest of the story.
Not sure which IDE "automatically commits". You probably can configure most of them to do it but does it do it smartly? I don't want to have to sort through a commit for every keystroke or one made at every arbitrary point (like every 5min). What is the chances it will compile? What are the chances any commit will have a complete step? I suppose you could trigger it from build events or better from when your unit tests run and pass but that wouldn't be automatic any more. Similar for word processors.
Look at iOS - how many apps have a "save" button at all? It's expressly discouraged from the Human Interface Guidelines
With no Save, how do you Revert? Or do Apple's Human Interface Guidelines for iOS expect applications to offer unlimited undo/redo that persists across reboots of the device?
There is still one program where I regularly regret not using ctrl-s often enough. Mathematica.
Obviously CanHasDIY doesn't play roguelikes. Roll a new character and start over.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
That is one of the very nice things about MacOS X -- since it uses the Command (clover) key for menu shortcuts, that leaves the Control key sequences available for emacs-style editing commands, which work almost everywhere.
Under Linux, I'm never sure whether Control-F will move forward, or bring up the "Search" dialog...
If using Git (or similar), perhaps the IDE can commit regularly, and afterwards the many commits can be turned into a single commit, with a commit message.
(I don't know if this exists or not.)
Why would anyone want to autocommit possibly broken code?
the mere thought of it makes my Heart Bleed.
Ctrl-S was always for pausing the display, I didn't know it was also saving anything - must have been some social engineering on the part of the NSA to make it save my work also. In any case, I prefer saving things at the points of my choosing on my own media. The real issue today is where does it save it? It's one thing to have a temp copy on hardware and media in your possession but something entirely more ominous if all the steps in your works-in-progress are being journaled forever in some corporate or government database entirely outside of your control or knowledge with only the appearance of "it's just a copy for your own good."
My XBox 360 had an autosave to cloud function. Only then that copy became corrupt. There were no other cloud copies. I had to start the game all over again after putting in many, many hours. I learned to periodically rotate between save multiple checkpoints to disk and periodically save to cloud.
"Love heals scars love left." -- Henry Rollins
When did it stop meaning that. I just pressed ctrl-S and my output was suspended. I pressed ctrl-q and it resumed.
If your terminal window is connected to a Unix-like system, this would be true. The TTY sub-system scans each character typed and if the flow control characters are found, output is paused/resumed. (depending upon your stty/termio settings, of course; IXOFF must be enabled. If IXANY is also enabled, then any character will resume data flow.)
They can take my LifeAlert pendant when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.
Autosave has been a standard feature of every editor I have used for decades and the first thing I do is disable it.
There are a variety of reasons for this depending on software. Weird temporary files littering folders. Wasting time/bandwidth. Freak outs when replacing storage or network interruptions. Not wanting contents of temporary markups written anywhere.
I understand people find these features useful yet I see no value in it.. saving requires no conscious effort.
More importantly TFA's version control theme is lame. Why would you version control all intermediate garbage? This would seem to me to be extremely counterproductive for cases where revision history is to be at all useful.
Well, as far as Git is concerned, that would be rather pointless, considering that committing in Git simply means copying an already saved file to a different directory locally. The only thing that protects you from is accidentally messing up the contents of the file and then saving it. And that is assuming that the IDE keeps the entire string of commits, instead of squashing them, creating an insanely bloated version history.
Of course you could set it up to automatically push the commit to a remote repository as well, in order to lose a slightly smaller amount of work if the hard-drive fails. I would use RAID instead.
I still use Ctrl-S for that purpose occasionally. The rest of the time Ctrl-S is bound to isearch by default. I was honestly confused about what Ctrl-S meant in this article until I realized it is what Notepad used.
Well now we have "my dog at my mobile device".
Yeah, there's no bold. Geez.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
Glad to see that somebody else had my same thought. The fuck? The whole point of committing is that you wait until you're fairly certain it works before you do it.
*cue mob of angry pitchfork-wielding, git-battlescarred developers when your autocommitted nonfunctional code fucks over a merge*
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
I've been using computers for over 30 years and have never once used this keystroke.
Is it telling that I ran across this article twice and both times thought "What's the problem? just hit Ctrl-R and get on with it!" Now what's this "application" you speak of?
Even more obscure: ESC, Transfer, Save.
Still using it. Thanks, Charles.
I come here for the love
I'm guessing that the law and the courts aren't as kind as your Mommy. They won't hold you close and listen to your crying, assuring you that it's all those mean kids' fault, will they? Tell ya what - have your Mommy post here about how her little darling committed suicide because of all us mean people drove him to it. You've done it before. Only - have her do it with a registered account this time. I could almost think you posted that yourself.
I don't believe that source code control should be used as a backup system. However a lot of people do feel this way for some reason, misusing the tools.
I appreciate Office applications saving pretty often.
But Crtl-S and Crtl-Alt-S (Save all Files) in Visual Studio are bread and butter to me.
I recently UXed a metadata explorer for the iSeries mainframe (Winform app), and it initially autosaved every change the user made (after validation of course). All three initial testers either asked how to save or if the data was being saved.
We updated the application, putting a Save button (that turns red when a data value is changed) on the main form (and a menu option - File->Save, and Ctrl-S support - three ways to save) and the issues went away (we add various "Save your work" steps to the UX script).
Some apps are expected to save incrementals (via user experience if nothing else), others are not. UX, I believe, is the key to determining where auto-save is appropriate. I specifically learned that auto-save and database analysis software don't go together...
BlameBillCosby.com
M2C thats really scary, first I dont want everything I type saved, secondly I prefer my commit-log not to be spammed to oblivion.
I'm used to just randomly hitting Ctrl+X then Ctrl+S in emacs when I pause and my fingers have nothing better to do. Semi-frequently, I do this in other applications without even realising I just did it, with various mildly weird results...
I'm going to use this in my next performance review. Should help explain a lot of things about my code.
>> My IDE commits code changes automatically.
Really? Checks into source control as you type? Builds if you stop typing? What? (I know what Visual Studio and Eclipse do...what ARE you using?)
Emacs FTW!
Computer simulation made easy -- LibGeoDecomp
A LOT of content these days is saved on the web. I type a lot of things on the web now, and lose quite a bit because often times there's no save feature at all, just post. At any time I could want to reference another browser window, have the browser crash, or accidentally close the window and lose everything I'm typing. That happens a lot, and I doubt I'm the only one.
In fact, with the web I lose a LOT more than I ever did 20 years ago, since the save features are rare, and auto-save is non-existent. I find myself using desktop apps less and less. Why would I open up Word for instance? The last time I used a word processor was editing my resume. Even that's a little anachronistic, but there's currently not a good alternative.
And no, I'm not even "the younger generation". But the point being, the web hasn't caught up to the desktop at all in terms of not losing content.
AccountKiller
Well, the Apple/Command key is really just a meta key in the end. It's just that Apple realized it should be used for shortcuts.
Of course, Microsoft didn't have that luxury as IBM decided to make a keyboard without a meta key for their PCs, and thus some bright spark at Microsoft decided to use Ctrl-C/V/X/Z instead.
It's so bad that Ctrl-V is remapped to Ctrl-Q on the Windows version of Vim.
Anyhow, I think autosave is nice, but only coupled with Apple's implementation of it. Basically it versions each autosave so you can go back in time and see it how it was at various stages, including being able to cut/copy/paste from the old version to the new.
Because otherwise, autosave is handy when your computer or the app crashes, but you can lose a lot of state information when you just have the current working copy saved.
git checkout -b daily-grind
Auto commit while I'm working on code. Time to commit to the public repo.
git rebase
Now I squash all those things I was doing into one commit.
git checkout my-working-branch
git merge daily-grind
git push
Now my working code has been pushed into a repository that's not got automated stuff, and from there I issue a pull request or perhaps push it over SSH to a more centralized server. I could do that from the automated repo, on bigger projects to avoid multiple copies, but on smaller repositories I like the extra layer of oops protection.
You see, branches in Git are easy and cheap, they're not massive checkouts of a repository, they're just pointers to places in time referencing the common history. That means you can make lots of commits and actually USE your version control locally rather than be a slave to it -- Afraid to commit unless you're absolutely positive you're ready. So, I create multiple new branches all the time, every day even just to do some experimental thing I might not want to commit, if things don't work out I just drop that branch and carry on. Git is my auto-save, so that I have unlimited undo.
Say you're working on a commit for hours or days and you haven't committed it yet because you're avoiding "thrashing the repository" by creating your own new branch. Hard drive fails. Now you've got to redo that work. Not me. I've got multiple drives for one, and for two a group staging server has a remote bacukp that's been pushed to every few minutes if there's been a change, so at most I've only lost a few minutes of work.
Doing this on someone else's dime? Sure, who cares, you get paid by the hour. On my time? Nah, "lost data" isn't a situation that I have to risk so I don't.
(Setting up a whopping big scrollback memory helps with that, though.)
One of my biggest gripes with most modern terminals, the scrollback buffer is uselessly small in the default configuration. Mac OS X is the only system where I don't feel the need to modify it literally the first time I do "cat /var/log/something"
Memory is not an issue for a graphical terminal on a desktop. There's no good reason for terminals to be defaulting to 200 lines anymore.
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
Hm, auto-pushing to a private remote branch would actually be useful in case of a hard-drive fail. But to actually be useful I would also need to have a copy of my working directory.
But then again, I rather risk losing 1~3 hours of work once in my life than setting up this kind of environment.
"you didn't have to type call -151, then c600g to actually load a program."
That booted DOS from a drive attached to slot 6. PR#6 was easier.
To run from tape, you did "LOAD", then "RUN" in BASIC.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Even you're not talking about auto-committing, though, which was the whole original point of this article. In this context auto-commits aren't going to help you any more than pounding Ctrl+S every once in awhile, since they reflect your thought processes not at all, either.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
Okay, so you explicitly say auto-committing at the beginning but that sounds antithetical to "you can make lots of commits and actually USE your version control," which sounds like you're purposely choosing when to commit, not every X time period.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
As Mr. Miyagi might have said, X On, X Off.
RETURN without GOSUB in line 1050
Ctrl-S stops text from scrolling on my terminal. I don't see how auto save helps with that.
I would be lost without it.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
You're getting called out pretty hard by APK.
That's how it always has been and always will be.
I work without fear of losing progress in all of the numerous applications I use (pedestrian, scientific, graphical, audio, etc.).
This is with the singular exception of MS Office Applications. They still crash and lose one's input on a regular basis. I save after every sentence I type. This is a behavior developed through many agonizing losses thanks to buggy MS apps. PPT will still corrupt its own files, so I end up with 10-20 versions of the same presentation, simply out of fear for PPT mangling its own files.
NOTE: I have no choice but to use MS Office Apps, as everyone else does.
Ah, you must be talking about real men. ;-)
Yeah - he's the gift that keeps on giving - sorta like gonorrhea. Hilarious, isn't he?
No, I think "Power outage" are these moments where the lights in all rooms suddenly go dark, and you grab the screen you were looking at and use it as a make-shift light source to find your way.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Nothing beats (1) timestamped backups or (2) manually versioning your file name (XXX1.doc,XXX2.doc,XXX3.doc) to preserve your thought evolution.
Well, git beats it, on the ground that you local clone still has the same roll-back history, but without polluting everything with tons of silly name, specially after one version has gone through an e-mail trip.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org do exactly the same.
And I'm sure that at least a few /.ers have taken git and applied it as form of "edit undo history" stored on non volatile support.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
What autosave seems to miss is that deliberately NOT saving something is an active choice at times. If I have a document - a graphics file say - and I want to just try a quick experiment but don't intend to permanently change the file, then that's my active choice. But autosave subverts that, making the 'experiment' far from quick, and a lot more long-winded. You have to duplicate the file or open a copy, or else undo or back out the change afterwards. It's much more work.
An app we develop (Mac) provides a preference so that you can opt-out of the system's standard autosave and do it manually. It's proved to be an extremely popular feature.
This wouldn't happen to be piping the output of cat to a file now, would it?
Mouse click in a dos box suspends output allowing you to srcoll up/down, hit enter to resume.You have to be quick if you're using the default buffer size.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
My day-to-day usage tells a different tale. You want to stand by and time me opening, editing, and saving files? First, using the mouse whenever reasonably possible, then again using keyboard shortcuts whenever reasonably possible. Let's see, for a real-life workflow, comparing the same application and platform, which is actually faster for a user who's experienced with the application they're using.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
It stopped meaning that in browsers and many windowed applications when Windows hotkeys started to creep in because the linux desktop wanted to provide a shallow learning curve for transitioning users. On top of all the other bullshit they've done to mess up text entry in the URL bar for people who can actually type, not providing an easy switch to choose a bash/emacs keybinding style bugs the hell out of me. Not sure exactly what CTRL-K supposedly does but it sure doesn't cut the line off.
Someone had to do it.
Does the latest version of Windows save the contents of an unsaved running Notepad, so if the system were to crash, Notepad would open up with the "unsaved" contents on your next login? I know Mac OS X does that with TextEdit (similar to Notepad), and Windows XP never did it. Not sure about Windows 7 or 8.
Now it's Shelve / Commit.
But even that might be history soon as I already have seen some auto-shelve plugins for my IDE.
Privacy is terrorism.
CTRL-S still suspends scrolling on my terminal now just like it did in 1997 on Slackware. What nonsensical software is the author using?
:w or :wq writes the file even when nothing has been changed. :x only writes when there was a change. :x only, so that file modification dates are not touched when no change was made.
ZZ or
It is better to get in the habit of using ZZ or
It is not really required to "just save your progress" as vi does that anyway. When it (or the system) crashes you
can normally recover your file from the tempfile it creates. Writing the file is only required when you want to pick it up in
some other program but not want to leave the editor.
Wrote an online 3rd-party app for a game from CCP Games, where I explicitly designed it to automagically update the server when people entered data - there was no need for, or way to, save things.
People helping out testing came back and asked, "How do we save things? Where is the save-button?"; apparently, the idea that things are saved continuously confused people.
From that experience, I concluded 2 things:
1) All apps should save progress automatically where possible (and sane)
2) I should use Alpha/Beta testers, that whine less
Vishnu scores from the rebound!
No wait, it's disallowed. The ref is signalling handhandhandhandball.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Losing data due to autosave of an accidentally modified version hinders "them [from] hav[ing] that positive user experience." Full undo history since day one ameliorates this hindrance. Automatic backup and data location transparency would in theory "help[] them have that positive user experience", but I'm not yet fully convinced as to how willing most people are to suffer a recurring fee for storage on someone else's server, a recurring fee charged by the ISP for data transferred between a device and someone else's server during backup and restore, and user interface complexity in determining how each saved revision relates to others.
Ctrl-S in an xterm suspends terminal input, and the characters you type aren't echoed back or acted on by the shell. Ctrl-Q resumes terminal input. So if you type Ctrl-S followed by "ls Directory", nothing happens and nothing appears in the terminal. But if you then type Ctrl-Q, the "buffered" command executes.
This rather nifty featured unfortunately was broken by the Gnome developers. Ctrl-S does nothing inside the Gnome terminal emulator. This still works in a traditional Linux/Unix terminal, as well as xterm.
It takes me a fraction of a second, and near zero thought, to save my work when I am pleased with it. All I want from autosave is a separate backup, to prevent automatic data loss (optionally with all the undo information). I don't want it autosaving half-edited files, especially not in code, nor halfway through a copy-paste in anything. When I hit save as, I don't want the file autosaved before also saving it with a different name.
Sure, people get burned when the computer eats their unsaved data. But that only happens once per person. Now I even save rather large posts on the internet, if only in my copy/paste buffer, before posting them since on occasion the website or my internet connection chokes on my data. This would actually be a nice place for a browser input box autosave, since I don't usually want to bother saving these (or rather the "save" process is posting on the internet and is sometimes unreliable).
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Must've been even worse after you left school. The workplace was going to be better - only it wasn't. Sure, the bullies couldn't pin you into a corner and pull your underwear up over your head anymore, but now it was even worse. Your coworkers and even your bosses were all friends, all members of the same "in" club which never let you in back in school. You're still smarter than all of them; they couldn't even begin to understand most of your ideas - so instead, they just refused to listen. No matter how superior your ideas were, your bosses kept saying things like "not best practices" and "industry standards" and things like that. They couldn't even begin to understand how superior your knowledge of computers was, so they conspired to lock you out. Your coworkers always seemed to get credit for your best ideas, leaving you the blame for anything which they couldn't make work. The bosses wouldn't listen; they are part of the conspiracy to keep you down, keep you from ever rising to the heights you deserve. Your Mom couldn't even help you anymore. You're alone. Still helpless, still being bullied by people who don't even understand a tenth of what you know about computers. You try at great length to get them to understand how superior your ideas are only to be told your ideas aren't "scalable" or "manageable". When you demonstrated for your employers how superior your ideas really are, they couldn't understand and found excuses like "due diligence" and "reliability". They used "best practices" as an excuse to not bother to understand your genius, your brilliance.
That's when it happened, isn't it? That's when you started work on your magnum opus, on the software that would make them all shut up. Only it didn't work that way, did it? They laughed at you, perhaps they even threatened to fire you if you didn't start working "with the team", a euphemism for pretending to be as stupid as they were. It was the schoolyard all over again, but no Mommy or Teacher in sight. This wasn't better, it was worse as you realized that all you could do was bite your tongue and take it, just like you had to take all the humiliation from the bullies on the schoolyard.
Based on the extreme vehemence of your response, I'm even more certain that I've correctly described the worthless ends of your life in every detail. So now I'm curious - do you spend your nights lying awake dreaming of revenge all the time, of getting back at everyone that hurt you, getting back at the Daddy who just couldn't respect a gutless worm like you; or perhaps Daddy was doing more and now you're just too old to be any good even for that? Even the Police and the Courts wouldn't help you. They keep telling you there's nothing you can do, but you know it's just the same old bullies from school still trying to keep you from being recognized for your superior intellect. You couldn't sue anybody; the lawyers keep telling you that they won't take this on contingency, that you don't have a chance of winning in a court of law. Mommy loves you but she can't afford to buy a lawyer to chase a lost cause. Now you're truly alone; even your Mommy doesn't understand or believe you. So now you live in your New York flat; your neighbors avoid you. They say you're strange, that there's something off about you. They can all sense that you're different, and they're all scared of you for it. Well, not scared. Hostile. That's the word. Even here where you're not showing everyone up in class, they still don't like you. Nobody'll be your friend, there's nobody left you can turn to. Mommy won't even hold you like she used to. Daddy never did respect you anyway; but now he doesn't even want to be around you (probably a good thing for you). There aren't even teachers left to turn to. Nobody at work (assuming you can hold a job) will be your friend or even give you a chance. So you end up here. Tell me, do you masturbate while reading your spampo
Eating my words. Done long ago (as you've so conveniently pointed out). So tell me - when will you man up? Or did all the abuse you've suffered over the years render you incapable of even that much maturity?
I'm going to leave off of you for awhile. You've obviously suffered enough; and I'm not entirely sure your problems are all functional. I'm beginning to suspect an organic component, and I've just realized that I don't want to be the stressor that sends you off on a psychotic rampage in the real world (the tantrums you've thrown here are ample evidence that your mental stability is precarious at best).
Please - seek out professional help. You desperately need it.
I've never used sockpuppets, etc. - despite your accusations to the contrary. However, your use of them is plainly known and understood. That's why you can't respond as a logged-in user - you can't risk losing or exposing your sockpuppets, isn't that right? They're your only "friends" in the world. Imaginary lovers, no doubt.
I don't suppose you understand the difference between admitting a mistake and "eating your words". Understandable in a person suffering from arrested development. I'd say you stopped emotionally maturing at about the age of thirteen. Please (please) - you don't need to tell anyone here, you don't need to tell anyone anywhere - but go find competent health care. Specifically, psychological or psychiatric care. Let's face it - many of our greatest authors, artists, composers, dreamers, doers, great thinkers - many of them have suffered from 'demons', from emotional or mental illness. I am truly sorry that I exposed what I am sure is a fairly accurate portrait of your life here on Slashdot. I really believe that with just a little help, just a little, you can have a vastly more satisfying and productive life.
Look, something as minimal as an employee assistance program can give you a lot of tools to improve your life. Honestly. They'll never tell anyone about what you share with them (unless you're a conspiracy theorist who sees NSA cabals in every corner). I'll never know. Nobody here will ever know. Your co-workers, your friends - none of them will ever know. You will be happier; you'll have an easier time maintaining friendships, forming relationships. Please - just go ask someone. A doctor, a priest, a friend. Anyone. It's no shame, but if you are ashamed it'll still be absolutely confidential. Please get some help.
Mike Mell.
A postscript: I truly do regret hurting you the way I did. I now recognize that your behavior is not mean or hateful, but rather the product of personal conditions which we as a society recognize and can help with. A programmer of your skill and abilities should not be marginalized for things which can be treated, corrected, fixed. Your code may or may not be genius; but until you can demonstrate emotional maturity only an imbecile will run it. Look, it doesn't even mean anything was truly wrong with you; but there are people out there totally prepared to do whatever is necessary to help you, to make you even more effective and capable. I'm not even asking you to commit to a course of action. All I'm asking is that you look into it? M
Habits. A lifetime of mistakes, repeated once more. I didn't do good. I have chosen never to be an agent of evil, yet here I have bent my intellect on the intentional harm of a human being. I only hope that I may be able to redeem this through honesty and honest concern.
'Scuse me - I have to go dine on ashes now.
Please get professional help.
M
I urge you once more to seek professional mental health care. Until you do, your software is unusable. You will not have respect. You need to learn appropriate public behavior, and I perceive clearly that will not happen until you have received therapeutic help.
M
Still works for me (cmd.exe window in MS Windows).
--
MY FACE MY FACE oh god no NO NOOOO NT stop the angles are not real ZALG IS TO THE PONY HE COMES
Alexander needs our support and help, not to be banned. He can't help himself; but perhaps if we show him some kindness and courtesy he can ultimately get the help he needs.
If insults and aggressive discourse are the only tools which you understand socially, I suppose we must blame your parents. It's not your fault, and while becoming an adult should make you responsible for your own actions, obviously this is not so.
Please seek psychiatric help at your earliest opportunity.
M.
You're still just a poor, abused child. Please get help soon - from a therapist, a priest, someone - or were you abused by priests too?
Yet of the two of us, I seem to be the only one capable of civilized behavior. Fascinating.
M.
You need help. You must have at least one friend somewhere who can point you in the right direction?
Listen, Alex - everyone here is aware of your abuses. I suppose in your mind that represents a reason to never admit to them - or perhaps your upbringing has left you so damaged that you can't even understand what's happening here. Either way, you need help. Serious help. It's not your fault - but as an adult, sooner or later you will have to take responsibility for your mistakes. You can't continue blaming your parents, or your childhood. I know your upbringing was traumatic, but you have an opportunity here to do something about it. Please talk to a doctor, a psychologist, a therapist, someone. Your life is a hell, but there is a way out. Your quoting of the Christian Bible implies that you have access to a priest somewhere - if you won't seek out a mental health professional, please see a priest. Someone. Anyone. Please.
M.
On the upside - at least you're vaguely varying the content of your posts. Perhaps you will eventually see the simple truth, that you need professional help.
M.
If this is the only form of gratification you have, doesn't that suggest to you that perhaps there is something wrong with you? Nobody (and I really mean nobody here supports you. You must wonder why that's so? Get help. From your previous quoting of Corinthians, you're presumably Christian (and I'll admit you're living up to all of my expectations of Christians here). Surely there must be a priest or nun you can turn to for help?
You need to seek mental health care immediately. I'm afraid my prior analyses of your background was too accurate, and I have likely done you irreparable harm. Please seek appropriate mental health care immediately.
Since we both seem to have over two decades of experience in the IT field, I will ask (no doubt in vain) for you to rein in your vitriol. You appear to have lost the capacity for rational thought. I'm truly sorry for my contribution to your current mental condition, and I regret my contribution to your continuing mental instability.
M.
Still works. Used it just last week. Now if you know what Esc-e means in the context of a very popular modem, I'd be impressed.
No, it was a fully mature "line editor", designed to the constraints of punchcards, coupled to a DB of sorts that held all source files. There was no change tracking in the usual sense, but it would show who last changed each line, and preserve that meta-data across renames.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I Ctrl-S every time I make a substantial change to what I'm working on and I don't plan to stop. You can throw whatever kind of autosave feature you want in, but I'm not going to stop saving manually. I've seen too many people get burned by not saving and relying on autosave or not understanding what autosave is and what its limitations are.
The biggest problem I have with Ctrl-S is if I open an existing script with the intent of modifying it and forget to rename it before hitting Ctrl-S. That sucks.
n/t
jokes need to make sense to be funny, i find, but i do realise most others find otherwise.