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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.
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
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).
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
Carl-s
It's only pronounced that way. When writing we still use "Ctrl".
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.
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!
Oh god, please don't tell me this is going to be the year of the Emacs Desktop?
If so I may just consider getting a job as a gardener....
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
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
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!
Perhaps you've heard of a thing called a power outage.
That's where you reboot and the file is full of garbage because it crashed half-way through writing the new file to disk and the metadata was updated but not the contents, right?
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
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.
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?
This is a solved problem: Office e.g. does a merry dance when saving files (save, then rename) to avoid exactly this problem, since it used to be such a big issue around 2000.
You can protect against user error; you can protect against Acts of God; but I remain unconvinced you can protect against Acts of Cat.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
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?
I can hardly wait for my EmacsBook!
Finding God in a Dog
Hold out for the EmacsBook Pro, I hear it will have a bigger screen and the processor might, I say might, just be enough to keep up with Emacs.
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
Well now we have "my dog at my mobile device".
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
M2C thats really scary, first I dont want everything I type saved, secondly I prefer my commit-log not to be spammed to oblivion.
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.
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.
CTRL-S still suspends scrolling on my terminal now just like it did in 1997 on Slackware. What nonsensical software is the author using?