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jiggawatts

I still have a habit of pressing CTRL-S intermittently...

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Man, this is so true. At least several times a week I press Command-S and unintentionally saved HTML from browser.

I even have a script to delete all HTML in my Download folder.

Yeah, do that too.

Funny. I also press ctrl-s in Firefox quite a bit, but for a completely different reason: in Emacs that shortcut invokes search.

I like how Firefox uses / for search like Vim.

I also find myself hitting ctrl-s in Firefox in an online ERP system we use when I really need to find and hit an Export To... button. I sit there for about two seconds staring at the Save As dialog wondering where it came from.

Been using this system for over two years now but I still find myself doing it at least once a week.

My wife is a user of Illustrator and Photoshop. A high cadence routine of SaveAs and Command-S on a regular basis has saved her from having to re-do hours of work so, so many times in 2019 alone.

So do I.

Also the habit of saving multiple copies, as a revision history. Because Word occasionally wrote garbage to files, while crashing.

Consider using org-mode [1] as your primary word processor and committing revisions to git. I recommend org-mode because org documents are saved as plain text and therefore can be easily diffed. org-mode can also be exported to many formats [2]. If you are concerned about how the look and feel of writing in plain text might impact your experience authoring a document, there are lots of editor specific tutorials for beautifying the presentation of org documents. Here is one such article on beautifying org documents in emacs [3]. Also, if you choose emacs as your editor and you are uncomfortable using git, then I recommend magit [4] because it makes git functionality highly discoverable.

[1] https://orgmode.org/

[2] https://orgmode.org/manual/Exporting.html#Exporting

[3] http://www.howardism.org/Technical/Emacs/orgmode-wordprocess...

[4] https://magit.vc/

Thanks. I mainly write in Geany, these days.

Well then you are already writing in plain text. Why not use git for committing revisions rather than making backup copies on the file system?

It is an interesting idea. But I'm more comfortable with stuff staying local, unless I explicitly put it online.

git is a local program that doesn’t require that you put anything online. It sounds like you might be unfamiliar with it and I suggest that you check it out - it might be just what you’re looking for!

OK, right. I jumped to GitHub.

But if it's local, what's the advantage vs saving as a file? Simple revision history management?

Yes, tracking changes. If something gets messed up, by a mistake or by a program trashing it, you can roll back to an earlier version. You also get tagging, to mark particular versions, and none of this clutters up the file system like multiple copies do, as it's hiding in a hidden folder.

I use git for any important private projects, and don't often use it online.

Also less simple revision history.

For some long lived documents I keep a "release branch" and make branches for playing around. If a direction or section isn't fruitful I can leave it on a branch without fear of losing "something good", and go back to mainline. I can also tag shared/published versions easily.

Oh and push a backup to another machine easily or automatically.

'Git' doesn't necessarily imply 'github'. You can make a local repo, and get all the benefits of VC without any necessary exposure.

I've got a script that monitors the disk for changes and then automagically commits to git. :-)

In university, we did programming exams on machines with no hard disks, which booted from DOS floppy disks.

The teacher recommended at the beginning of the exam to save often, especially before running our programs, because if they got stuck, we would have to reboot, losing everything.

Of course, there was still a guy that typed for a whole hour without saving. Upon running his program, it obviously crashed and he lost all his work.

I got the habit of saving constantly pressing ctrl-s ever since. I do it even in apps that don't save anything, getting annoying sounds from my computer.

And then you work on an interface like Confluence's page editor where for no good reason, Ctrl+S is mapped to exiting the edior. It saves your edits in the background while you type, so you don't lose anything. But you get interrupted in a big way. Changing that would be trivial, but Atlassian deprioritized it to the bottom of the stack.

That one unorthodox hotkey mapping is just the tip of the iceberg. Confluence's interface is a super special, highly unique dumpster fire of an editor. God forbid anyone actually know what Markdown syntax is. Plus, you can only disable some of the hotkeys - you're stuck with several awkward site-wide ones. There's an open Atlassian support ticket filled with souls wistfully begging for the ability to disable ALL Confluence hotkeys. I hope they fired the intern that wrote it.

On the contrary, Atlassian PMs who actually respond to these requests seem to consistently double down on the status quo.

Outlook for Windows has alt-S and control-Return mapped to ‘Send’. The Mac version ‘betters’ that by using command-S and command-Return. Luckily, one can change that.

Last week my colleague and I were sharing screens while he was writing a document. 10 minutes in and some good wording put into the document I asked him: "Are you saving this?". He answered, "yes, I do Ctrl+S while typing, I mean, between words". And I couldn't even notice it. That's level 5 in the craze scale.

Yup. A few years ago I tried to reduce my dependence on the computer by writing more things down by hand, only to discover my left hand had developed a nervous tic that resulted in me attempting to hit command-S on the paper.

>> I still have a habit of pressing CTRL-S intermittently...

I still do it reflexively after every significant change.

Better than CTRL-C though. We used to have an Microfocus COBOL app (in the twin-floppy days) that would happily let you spend the entire day entering data, then fail to trap an accidental CTRl-C (it's close to "S", obvs). The developers had never allowed for that. Soul destroying..

Using kdenlive for video editing on Linux has served has a good reminder many times to save often.

Cloud and mobile apps are often very good at taking this task away from a user, but it's worth remembering to take responsibility for saving/backing up files that have value.

Even clouds can get blown away some times.

Once, when I was using inDesign, I unlearned this behavior. Saving would take about 10 seconds.

3 hours later...

Now, I save whenever I am happy with a single edit.

Yes, and browsing through the TMP folders in hopes of finding some temporary savings of your data. :D

I still do that, even when I write in google docs.

But then again I don't think it was more than a month ago that some coworker lost work because Photo Shop crashed and they hadn't saved in a while.

Some online editors are still struggling with that. Lost a whole day of work just because I had an IP change and Thrive Architect for Wordpress did not save my edits.

Same here... so many bad memories of losing 2 hours of writing school works.

I always press it. Now it formats my code too!

I have seen saving causing a crash! :-(

I think everyone older than 30 does.

I also have the habit of pressing it more than one time, every time I press it.

I'm not even be sure that save will really save.

Is this an age thing? I do the exact same thing. Every time I stop typing I hit ctrl-s between 2-5 times. I don't eve think about it anymore.

My kids are getting to the age where they are doing projects on a computer and I'm constantly telling them to "save early, save often."

I guess it's some form of PTSD from computing in the 90's.

I worked at the help desk when I was in college back in the 90s and our mantra to users (and ourselves) was “save often and make backups”. We figured the more people we could inculcate that practice into, the fewer “I’ve been writing all afternoon and the computer just crashed, I can get my work back, right?” and “My only copy of my thesis was on this floppy and now I’m getting a disk read error, you can fix it, right?” visits we’d get that would end in tears.

It's not an age thing I don't think. I'm 22 and after I finish any tiny section of code I format it and then save. I don't know why, it's just habit now

Yeah, but do you save several times before you're finished that tiny section?

Several times? No, just saving once is sufficient.

Why not twice to be sure?

Because most programs don't do anything if no changes were made between the current state and the last save. VS Code shows which files have changes made since the last save, for example.

Exactly why it doesn't hurt to save a bunch of times to be sure.

> save early, save often.

I got the same advice from my grandfather, who grew up in the Great Depression. I think it was PTSD on his part, too.

It feels like a programmer thing, since unsaved files won't be compiled when you run the program. At least that's where I got the habit from

Programmers have an additional issue with incremental build systems that do not always rebuild everything they should.

My dad was doing support & sysadmin and it was save and make copies, both on-line (it was 5 years before we would start using cloud) and on physical media.

A few months ago, I saw a popular meme on Reddit (ProgrammingHumor, or something like that) where the core of the joke was: "that face when Visual Studio crashes after you've been writing code for 2 hours and forgot to save."

And my reaction was: how do you forget to save? That's muscle memory for me, man! Command-S gets hit five times in as many minutes.

IntelliJ doesn't have "saving", it writes all files to its cache constantly and then to the original files as soon as you alt+tab, and yet I still find myself hitting Ctrl+S constantly, usually as part of like a nervous tic or something, where while I'm thinking I'll save, paste my clipboard, undo, repeat.

How do you code for 2 hours without saving, considering you wouldn't be able to run/test/compile without saving?

I’ve coded for hours early on in a project without compiling/running/testing. But I’m old enough and wise enough to constantly save.

It definitely is! My company recently connected Office to OneDrive, which means everything saves automatically. I still find myself saving after every paragraph.

I ctrl-s or :w every time I take my hands off the keyboard. A friend of mine, considerably younger, was lamenting that their computer crashed while they were working on a 3d model in Maya and they lost an hour's worth of work because they hadn't saved. I was in absolute disbelief. I pressed the issue, there was no good reason to go without saving every time the file changed, it's not like the program got bogged down when they clicked the save button. They trusted the auto save feature. We had two completely different paradigms.

I still to this day have problems with various MS Office products failing to save or not auto-saving on the latest Office for Mac. So I spam that Cmd+S button as often as I can.

I moved to using an IDE. Everything is saved and always. There isn't even a save button. I also moved from vi/vim quite painlessly and never find ':wq' or 'hhhjjjj' in documents that I have edited, this was a genuine danger once.

With the right tools - an IDE with version control - the quaint notion of saving files can be mostly forgotten and the fear of losing unsaved work banished. Even if over 30 adaptation is possible so long as it is an easy, downhill path with less to do instead of new stuff to learn.

It used to be 'Jesus saves' but now, for me, my motto is to just use an IDE.

VB6’s IDE doesn’t auto save. Ugh.

I do this for ctrl-C copying, because for a short while, years ago I had a keyboard where the C-key would occasionally fail. I have long since replaced this keyboard, but the habit of just hitting ctrl-C more than once is not entirely gone.

I had a similar problem about a decade ago. My muscle memory for editable text became CTRL-X CTRL-V so I could see the the text had been copied.

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