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Comment by jader201 | Hacker News Reader

I’m both old and old fashioned, but I’ll take auto-save any day over manual save, especially something that required manual save without support of auto-save.

I’ve lost enough work prior to auto-save being common that I never want to deal with an app that doesn’t somehow save my work pretty frequently.

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> I’ve lost enough work prior to auto-save being common

And you didn’t develop the habit of compulsive Ctrl-S every five seconds? ;)

multiple ctrl-s' per few characters typed/whenever I stop writing something.

I like autosaves as well, but as a "I didn't save manually but there is always an autosave"-option. Saving is also a file managment choice.

It really depends on what the app is though, yeah? If I'm in document processing or spreadsheet where you might be working for long periods where a 5min auto-save kicks in could be convenient. However, when I'm writing code that then needs to make rapid changes like updating CSS/JS/etc to be refreshed in browser, then I'm not waiting 5 mins for an autosave. Cmd-S, Cmd-tab, Shift-Cmd-R, boom.

However, Cmd-S is so engrained into the muscle memory, that it's almost instinctual to hit it after every press of a semi-colon.

If I type in rm -rf / and pause for a moment trying to remember if I’m trying to delete /var/log/apache2/ or /usr/local/var/log/apache2/ in a dev environment that auto-executes code when I save it I would strongly prefer that it wait until I manually save.

Which is why I like Autosaves that save a copy. Blender for example autosaves project files into it's own location (and keeps that location clean). If you have a crash you can still go for that autosave file and it works in most cases – but it isn't saved in the folder you are working in.

For certain programs this would be overkill of course, but for others it would be quite cool.

It’s interesting. I use vim which has auto-recovery built in. But I also compulsively save. vim is so much faster than most conventional IDEs that it’s just not worth it for me to look for an alternative to that pattern.

> However, when I'm writing code that then needs to make rapid changes like updating CSS/JS/etc to be refreshed in browser, then I'm not waiting 5 mins for an autosave. Cmd-S, Cmd-tab, Shift-Cmd-R, boom.

VSCode has an autosave that's triggered when you change a file.

I would guess that they swiped that idea (among many of the core features of VSCode) from IntelliJ a good 10 years after they implemented it. Too bad they can't steal more sane ideas from JetBrains' IDEs, I might actually consider switching ;)

I doubt IntelliJ invented the "save on change" feature.

> Too bad they can't steal more sane ideas from JetBrains' IDEs, I might actually consider switching ;)

Not being an IDE is what I like about it, my experiences with JetBrain's IDEs weren't good.

There are reasons for manual save to exist, but I think it's unlikely to stick around as a distinct GUI element which requires an icon.

Experienced users will use a keyboard shortcut, others will rely on autosave or find the File > Save menu. Alas, I suspect the floppy disk icon is doomed.

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