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Comment by acqq | Hacker News Reader

Users who do "Ctrl-S" to do fast save are certainly a minority. (1) That minority can have somewhere in the configuration of the site the setting where they can turn the default off, but the default should really be for $deity sake, don't override the default behaviour!

1) I'm old enough that I've programmed the computers with the front panel switches bit by bit, but I've never used "Ctrl-S" as the "fast save" when writing documents. I don't know actually anybody who does. Autosave in Word functions as it should (not needing any user action) since at least 1998. My code editors and IDEs all do autosave too before compiling. What's the auctual benefit of ever using Ctrl-S in the middle of writing?

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I've lost too much data to trust to autosave. When coding I don't want autosave, because I don't want my computer to be trying to compile all the time (I write Scala, I don't have the RAM to do that) - I want it to wait for an explicit Ctrl-S to tell it that I've finished a meaningful section and it should compile now. I have exactly the same thing on prose.io (which I write on a lot, and which looks very similar to medium), where "saving" means creating a git commit - I don't want an automatic commit for every letter I type, but I do want to commit very frequently, after each paragraph or similar unit. Rather like when programming.

It becomes a mental tic, an "I've finished the paragraph" instinct. And I'm very glad medium handles it.

What do you use actually that doesn't have "undo"? I can "undo" the whole day of my work on the file until I close it in the IDE. Whatever is "lost" I can return to the previous point.

If you're asking why I use git at all, my IDE crashes often enough that I don't want it to be my sole store of history; also I want that history available to my colleagues or my future self, weeks or months from now.

When coding I don't want autosave, because I don't want my computer to be trying to compile all the time

Can you explain this? Is it common to use an IDE that autocompiles every time it autosaves?

It's the way I'm used to working, I can't say how common it is. Put it this way: I want to control when it compiles, and I want it to be very obvious if the error markers aren't up to date. So the setup I currently have is eclipse with automatic compilation but manual saving; the possible states are saved and up to date, unsaved (obvious from stars in the title bar) or still compiling just after a save (obvious from progress in the status bar). When I tried to use IntelliJ with its autosaving I found I was pushing code to master that didn't even compile, because I would make a change and then not realize that this had broken something.

> Users who do "Ctrl-S" to do fast save are certainly a minority.

My first reaction: How else do you save?! You mean you actually take your hands off the keyboard, and click the floppy icon in a toolbar? Or even.. click on File > Save? Seriously?

I think this assumption as a very strong population bias.

With the people I work with.. it's all about keyboard shortcuts. If you don't know your basic keyboard shortcuts, you're too slow. But then again, I work around people with super customized Vim and EMacs configs and people who live in Photoshop/Illustrator all day. You just can't be productive in those environments without keyboard shortcuts.

For me, users who don't do "Ctrl-S" to save are certainly a minority.

Agreed. I also used ctrl-shift-p to preview Github comments with similar frequency while composing, and get frustrated when I get print dialogues in my mail window.

> I've never used "Ctrl-S" as the "fast save" when writing documents. I don't know actually anybody who does

I, for one, used to have this habit. The notion of "not knowing anyone who uses Ctrl + S" is a bit funny - are you really aware whether people around you do this or not? How does it come up?

By watching normal non-programmers people like my girlfriends and programmers people like my colleagues with whom I worked closely. Former just don't do any Ctrl-anything during the writing. The later simply never needed Ctrl-S, just like I. Autosave really works in the most common tool, Word. When my girlfriend lost her work, it was never for the autosave, but for manually saving over something she did before or Word corrupting the file during the save (the corrupted file was still luckily readable by OpenOffice).

By watching normal non-programmers people like my girlfriends and programmers people like my colleagues with whom I worked closely. Former just don't do any Ctrl-anything during the writing.

[Dr. Watson's voice] He does that thing again!

The actual benefit of using ctrl-S (or cmd-S for us Mac folk) is that autosave is still not ubiquitous, and I'd much rather press cmd-S regularly when it's not necessary than fail to press it and then discover that I needed it. The great thing is that it's basically instantaneous now so it costs nothing to press it every few words, which definitely wasn't the case when I acquired the reflex in the late 80s or early 90s.

For this particular default I see no problem in overriding it. I'm sure there's only a minority that routinely uses ctrl-S to save a lot, but essentially nobody uses ctrl-S to save a web page that contains a document they're in the middle of editing, given how esoteric that is and how unlikely it is to produce a useful result.

That's not to say that overriding defaults is good in general. But there's no need to be consistent about it. Overriding ctrl-S is totally different from overriding the arrow keys, for example.

I use some particularly crashy software at work, and even when autosave does work I have to play "Damn it, where did they put the autosave folder?" If I've saved in the last few minutes I can usually just redo it faster than finding the most recent save file.

I ought to keep a shortcut to that on my desktop.

Make that shortcut now before you forget about it again!

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