I'm always a bit frustrated that Google Docs doesn't have a save icon. It simply says "All changes saved in drive". But you see this doesn't stop my habitual compulsion to press the save icon (or at least do :w in Vim).
After using an autosave plugin for minecraft server, I'm annoyed by the need to unfocus notepad++ to get it to save. I would almost rather have my changes written directly to disk automatically. I don't want to have to think about if my file is saved or not.
I spend a lot of time editing code that is being served by a local development server, and much of the time I do not want my changes saved until they are a complete set simply because I don't need it to start feeding me a bunch of errors from half-finished code.
Similarly, there are a lot of times when I will open a document, modify or reformat part of its contents in preparation for copying them somewhere else with different requirements, and then close the document without saving it.
So aren't there any times in your workflows where you don't want the files saved unless you explicitly want to commit some changes?
When Excel or Word crash, I have to wait several minutes while the program closes, reports to the reporting server and checks for problems, then tries to recover my file. Or my other choice is to cancel the reporting and reopen the file manually, where it still has to recover.
I can't even just reopen my unsaved file to redo my changes.
This has been my experience since using Office 2007 on Windows Vista. It's still the same with Office 2010 on 7, and I don't know that it will change with Office 2013 on 8.
Anyway if you have issues waiting minutes for the program to report the error then something has gone terribly wrong with your install. Possibly you have a broken DNS? I don't know, that is weird and has absolutely nothing to do with the saving mechanism.
The point I was making is that there should be constant/regular automatic saves that don't touch the original file.
That's not quite what I want. I want the original file to be updated basically constantly.
>Anyway if you have issues waiting minutes for the program to report the error then something has gone terribly wrong with your install. Possibly you have a broken DNS? I don't know, that is weird and has absolutely nothing to do with the saving mechanism.
This issue has persisted for me across multiple desktops and laptops, on business and residential connections, from multiple ISPs over differing physical media across the Puget Sound region. If DNS were the issue, it would be a massive and persistent issue affecting a major tech hub...
Also you really want your original file affected when you cut a paragraph with the intent to paste it somewhere else, or when you're doing some analysis and destructively sort the file?
What we really need is a good icon for "bookmark version", and there aren't many good time travel analogies to leverage to come up with good metaphors.
Save is an anachronism. Don't enforce usability hardships for the common case to satisfy the special rare niche case.
Furthermore, "forking" is what happens when you "check out" a file to memory and "merging" your changes occurs when you write them back. You are only modifying the terminology. Replacing the "save" verb with "merge" would not be doing the user any favours.
I'm totally for getting rid of the discrete "compile" and "debug" icons in the IDE, my research centers around that.
Do you also continuously merge your feature branches with mainline in realtime?
Don't use high-level word processors to edit your config files, problem solved. But don't demand that our word processors to behave like your text editor that you use to edit config files.