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Comment by amalcon | Hacker News Reader

> MS Word in the 90s and 00s would regularly crash and take your file with you,

It's an old joke at this point that you can tell when a person first became a serious computer user based on how frequently they save their work. My muscle memory for ctrl+s is so ingrained that I type it every minute or two in things like Google Docs that literally ignore it.

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To this day I always copy comments to the clipboard before submitting them or after I feel like I've put a lot of work into them -- owing to dubious browser UI[2] c. 2000, where e.g. you might accidentally lose focus of the text field, and then the backspace button would navigate backwards[1] and lose everything you had typed up.

So my muscle memory is a lot of ctrl-a, c.

[1] A mistake that Chrome adopted afterward and didn't reverse until 2016: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/16/05/19/2041232/google-chro...

[2] Wasn't the only cause, of course. The request could fail as well.

This is my Jira trauma resurfacing thanks. I'm quite heavy on technical explanations, like to put a lot of context, links, references, alternatives, notes in my tickets. Now I just write with outlook (less formatting options than word, actually saves my 35-pages-long shit while typing and people can read it without logging into some slow monster, and I can insert images really fast inline) and save to add an attachment to Jira.

Still possible to lose data in the modern dubious UI on the web, so you could an extension like GhostText and type comment in a regular text editor where you. get recovery for free even if both apps crash

> GhostText

How did I not know about this?? And it supports Firefox + (neo)vim!

I still have this total distrust about closing Google documents without any sort of save operation.

I remember playing “Maniac Mansion” for 12h without saving. Right before the end my computer crashed. All was lost. But at least I did the second run in 8h.

Pretty much every time I finish typing something I end with ctrl+S. Its muscle memory from the old days, but now it triggers vs code to format whatever I just wrote, which is a convenient side effect.

I may have lost days on aggregate from just waiting many seconds for the browser to respond after an accidental Ctrl+s that triggers "Save Page" - why is that operation so slow anyway?

It seems to list a bunch of directories. It is slower on Windows.

It may also make sense to cache some search data and ping some network resources, because those dialog boxes don't just show directories nowadays.

Surely I would prefer them to do those asynchronously, but the UI designers seem to all disagree.

My IDE auto-saves as you make changes, yet I still mash ctrl+s frequently. I think it's mostly games that gave me the habit though. PC gaming has always been a gauntlet.

> My IDE auto-saves as you make changes

This gave me shutters. Maybe it is some sort of manual transmission-type feeling of control, but that is terrifying to me. Something about that feeling of owning when the source file is changed.

The most annoying thing for me is that the idea of take something similar, make my changes to it, and save it under a different name only mangles the original file in today's world.

“Save” vs “Save as” is such a terrible convention…

It is, because arguably the more common case is wanting to save a snapshot under a different name and continue editing the original. "Save as", unfortunately, does the opposite.

I, personally, want save to act like committing a transaction. I don't like making changes to something and having every key typed or item clicked on be an immediate change to the file. The common case for me is to start making changes, then save them when I'm ready, sometimes as another file name. At least 30 years of this behavior has been ingrained into my workflows. We have undo, but I'd also like to have a revert changes option that acts like rolling back a transaction. The simple rollback is to just close the file without saving, but that doesn't work if every change big or small is a commit.

Felt the same way after first going from eclipse to intellij. This fear, this lack off. But after a while i didn't notice anymore and i have never run into a situation where something important was lost. In the opposite. Saving and making copies and even duplicating code in a file like an older version of an sql statement is some kind of fear/hoarding impulse, that doesn't seem to pay off at all.

Oh, really? I've got vim set up to auto-save the buffer every time I leave insert mode. It's phenomenal. I literally never need to think about saving.

I guess more analogous to your "save" mechanism would be my git commit.

I felt the same way, but there are three layers of defense for me, in order: robust undo, git commits, and the IDE maintains a history of its own with a certain number of revisions back in time.

I wrote my first program in 1994 in Turbo Pascal.

Yes, you're right, Ctrl-S is so deeply embedded in my subconsciousness that I will be probably pressing those keys on my deathbed.

Open office had autosaving functionality about 15 years before MS Office managed to figure it out, despite loss of work due to unexpected power outages or Office freezing up was a regular occurrence for everyone I knew back then.

I still can’t get used to Confluence exiting edit mode upon Ctrl+S.

This explains everything.

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