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Comment by jussij | Hacker News Reader

Most of the features listed seemed fairly standard for any programming editor.

But what surprised me was this requirement:

> Autosave on focus lost

I'm not sure why any software would initiate a save that was not requested by the user. This seems to be protection for software that has a habit of crashing.

Is this really a good feature?

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It’s convenient if you also have something that automatically builds your code when it changes, and then refreshes the browser (that latter part isn’t necessary). That way, you don’t have to think about saving before switching to the browser. Or you can switch to the terminal to run your thing in one keystroke instead of two. It doesn’t make all workflows easier, but it doesn’t hurt too often — if I decide I don’t want to make a change, I just use the editor’s undo feature, or revert all changes to the file using git.

Seems a strange requirement indeed. What happens if you didn't want to save the changes? Rather what is good to have is saving the state so can be recovered but not committing changes to file. Protection against losing progress isn't only related to the software itself but also the environment. E.g. window manager crashing, operating system crashing, power outage, etc. All the times I had to recover file changes wasn't because the editor crashed but due to something else.

autosave makes programming feel more interactive like a video game.

We all have our opinion. I view auto save as essential but it can always be configurable.

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