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Comment by unicornporn | Hacker News Reader

There is one reason I've stuck with TextWrangler for so long. It has excellent auto saving features. I can close the application with dozens of unsaved documents, and it opens with the exact same state the I left it in if I re-open. Some of the documents I have open have been sitting unsaved for over a year, surviving restart, crashes and god knows what. AFAIK, I have never lost a document in TextWrangler.

The Textadept manual says:

> By default, Textadept saves its state upon quitting in order to restore it the next time the editor starts up.

But how well does it work in practice? Does anybody have experience?

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Sublime does the "autosave unsaved docs" thing too, and does it flawlessly. (I have other gripes with Sublime, I just don't think this is a USP for TextWrangler.)

At least on the beta channel that hasn't always been flawless. You can find many reports and patch notes regarding corrupted sessions and I've definitely lost some work over the years to that, the last time happening just half a year ago on the then latest version.

+1 for TextWrangler. With it's solid remote file support, inline file browser (if you open a directory or have multiple files open in the same window), ability to not choke on multi-GB files, and solid regex Find+Replace support (including over those multi-GB files), TextWrangler is an amazing piece of software that Just Works©. Combined with an alias[1] in my terminal, it's been such a productivity boost.

[1] On OSX (can give it either a directory or file argument):

  alias tw='open -a /Applications/TextWrangler.app'
  tw /path/I/want/opened/

This same feature is what keeps me staying with Sublime. It's brilliant.

For people using Emacs looking for autosave.

(add-hook 'focus-out-hook (lambda () (save-some-buffers t)))

This is not autosave, this saves open buffers, and may cause saving changes you may have wanted to discard. With non version controlled files this may cause data loss/corruption. See "Auto Save" in emacs manual instead.

I've guessed you mention about autosave feature like SublimeText, but I tried TexAdept and found only Save session at the File Menu, it's not autosave, just save the sessions by hand

VSCode does this as well, per project. It works really well.

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