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Comment by anthonyrubin | Hacker News Reader

What if a box were provided near the top of the document with the document's current name? To rename the file you simply type the new name in the box.

Users should never really have to worry about saving. Google Docs does a good job of keeping documents saved without any need for user intervention.

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A box with a name would be good, but you miss one important function of saving I took pains to preserve: it is the action which turns tentative changes to the file into permanent ones. You want to preserve those tentative changes, but you don't want to put them in the actual file until the user commands it.

True, with current software you don't want to save tentative changes but the only reason for that is that your "undo" history is lost the instant you close a program. If you could undo changes through the entire history of the document explicitly saving becomes pointless.

That works for a Word document, but what if you were editing a PHP file? You neither want your changes to be immediately applied while they aren't finished, nor can the PHP interpreter handle a special format with embedded undo.

Or, lets suppose you just log the undo in a hidden file alongside the original. Imagine you've edited a lot of files. All that eternal undo would pile up, and you'd end up with gigabytes wasted on useless undo logs. Plus plenty of stranded logs from moved files.

No, the ability to save, to not save yet, and to abandon the undo - those are useful features.

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