Hacker News Reader

Comment by agloe_dreams | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com