Hacker News Reader

Comment by SoftTalker | Hacker News Reader

Indeed, but it was pretty easy to develop the habit of hitting whatever function key was bound to "Save" fairly frequently. I certainly did.

Also auto-save is a mixed bag. With manual save, I was free to start editing a document and then realize I want to save it as something else, or just throw away my changes and start over. With auto-save, I've already modified my original. It took me quite a while to adjust to that.

View on HN

If your program's auto-save works like that, it's broken.

Almost none do, though. Auto-save almost always writes to a temporary file, that is erased when you save manually.

Google Docs and VS Code are the first two that come to mind for autosave and they don't use a temp file.

Fun fact: I was on the Google Docs team from 2010-2015. Save didn't do anything but we still hooked up an impression to the keystroke to measure how often people tried to save. It was one of the top things people did in the app at first; it was comparable to how often people would bold and unbold text. And then as people gained confidence it went down over time.

This is DELIGHTFUL.

Yeah, source code editors tend to do that. They integrate with external tools that expect to read those files, so if they don't overwrite them, those tools would run the wrong version. It would still be better if they didn't.

Text editors shouldn't do that though. And those shared-view editors that don't have the concept of saving have this very relevant drawback.

I still occasionally make that auto-save mistake.

AI tools have caused me to trip up a few times too when I fail to notice how many changes haven’t been checked into git, and then the tool obliterates some of its work and a struggle ensues to partially revert (there are ways, both in git and in AI temporary files etc). It’s user error but it is also a new kind of occasional mistake I have to adapt to avoid. As with when auto-save started to become universal.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com