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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Re: the "this is how it should have always worked" comment.

I've watched my girlfriend use her computer, and this is essentially how she works. She just leaves everything open, never saving anything. She's comfortable using Expose to manage the million windows she ends up having open, but doesn't bother exiting apps when she's done with them and then starting them when she needs them again.

If she could do this and have everything always auto-save and be instantly available anywhere she went, she'd be ecstatic. And even though I grew up on the Windows 95 model of apps and documents... I gotta say I kinda see her angle. I hate that our IT policy makes us log out every night so I lose my windows. If I left for the night then came back and the cleaning person had put away all the papers on my physical desk I'd have a fit!

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@Auto-Save

In Snow Leopard 10.6 when I close TextEdit the program asks me nicely and naggingly per pop up if I want to save the document as a file. To the hard disk. And this file needs a name. Because everything is a file. And if don't save I lose my changes!

In Lion 10.7 TextEdit simply quits dutiful. And opens at restart all unsaved documents again. Auto-save seems like a small feature, but conceptually it is big. Damn, it should have always worked that way!

(The TimeMachine-like versioning still needs a saved document. Every Command+S acts as a saved point you can go back in time.)

That's exactly how I use my computer. I reboot about once every 2 months, and only because I need to install a nagging security update or two. I never quit apps.

Sigh, I realized today that Ctrl+Alt+Del isn't that unrealistic to hit, when you use Emacs. :-(

(But then, most any key combination is probably quite easy to get in Emacs, by missing a couple of keys.)

My girlfriend does exactly the same thing. I wonder if its a gender thing? Her PC kept freezing, but she loves her new Mac Air.

More likely it's a non-tech-person thing. Leaving everything open and clicking around in expose until you find stuff is easy: closing programs and then trying to find where you saved stuff via a file manager is hard.

That's because "tech people" have been conditioned, through the years, by the limitations of the hardware (limited memory) and operating system. It's the OS's job to manage resources, but we still do it anyway. Which is why Apple's upcoming Lion OS with auto-save, auto-resume, window management etc will be a god-send for many people I know.

I don't close programs anymore either, and I'm male. I do close documents to keep Exposé from getting unworkable, but my emacs usually has dozens of buffers open.

To provide a anecdotal counter point to balance this discussion, I obsessively close windows I'm not using.

I dislike clutter and distraction. If I leave a Twitter client open or IRC I easily get distracted by it, so I'm constantly hitting CMD-W and use Quicksilver to open them when I need distraction. Same with iTunes when no music is playing.

I enabled spaces so I could push the things I wasn't ready for into the corners.

I strong suspect it's a non-techy thing. The only reason it might seem to some here to be a gender thing is because the majority of people here are straight men, and ones girlfield/wife/partner is the person you'll see doing mudane things like typing on a PC.

Please don't say things like this. Why should it be a "gender thing"? This only alienates people. "You don't close your windows? Like a girl?"

I can say that one person is male and another person is female without insulting either of them. Pointing out a difference between genders is not automatically derogatory.

No, but saying "hey, your girlfriend does this, my girlfriend does this, too! It's probably because they are both women!" is insulting if there is no reason whatsoever to believe that there really is something genetic behind the behaviour. I have seen the reverse of this too, when a friend visited and told me that I had a big LCD, just like her boyfriend, and that it was typical for males to buy large screens for their computers.

I like Windows 7's window management features well enough that I leave everything open (most things minimized) all the time. I've got 18 windows in 12 applications open, 3 of them visible. Win7 isn't perfect for this, but it's really pretty pleasant.

I'm also using about 6 gigs of RAM, but since I have 8 to play with, why not? :)

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