It's kind of insane to that in 2022 were still dealing with "save early, save often."
Our tools are so antiquated. Storage is cheap and computers are fast, every keystroke should be persisted somewhere I can recover from rather than having to manually save and commit works in progress.
Well, it's funny because the Apple stuff works like this, but not Xcode.
I pretty much never save anything with Page/Numbers/TextEdit. I just quit
Not only do I not lose changes, I don't lose editions. I can go back to older versions. And that's not including Time Machine. It's simply "built in".
From a user experience, it's really wonderful and no stress. I don't even think about it. At the same time, I have no idea where these extra versions are stored but, honestly, I don't care.
I do wish other applications worked similarly. Source code is tricky, but it probably wouldn't be awful to have a similar experience.
vim had an undo tree for 10 years (or longer?) [0] and there are plugins (eg [1]) that make it very easy to go back in history and also to explore different branches of your undo/edit history. Dura will not track changes that are not saved to disk IIUC
Saving a log of every keystroke is basically what a CRDT for an editor does today. We really just need to make local editors behave more like Google Docs and de-emphasize use of the save button (everything is always saved at all times).
A lightweight way to accomplish this is to at least set up frequent autosaves in your editor. I had `au FocusLost * :wa` in vim to save all buffers to disk whenever it loses focus. Now that I've converted to the church of VS Code (with vim bindings, of course), there's an "Auto Save: onFocusChange" config option to do the same thing. I don't know how people live without it!
You don't always want to save to disk though, you want to save in a consistent state. Vim allows you to set up a persistent undo that will let you load the modified buffer from a backup file without touching the original until you're ready. Or undo back to the saved on disk version. Or undo even further to previous versions. That's true persistence.
> It's kind of insane to that in 2022 were still dealing with "save early, save often."
Those of us who don't code in autosynced folders, that is. There is tons of software (IMO better than the approach in TFA) that has solved this problem for years now. Dropbox or Google Drive if you trust the cloud. Unison or looping rsync or syncthing if you don't.
It's rare, but I have lost history once or twice, possibly after a computer restart. It's great when it works (which is almost always) but not foolproof.
Navigating in this history might be a challenge. But I agree. My disk is filled by dozens of random docket images yet few megabytes of diffs are not stored.
It's kind of insane to that in 2022 were still dealing with "save early, save often."
Our tools are so antiquated. Storage is cheap and computers are fast, every keystroke should be persisted somewhere I can recover from rather than having to manually save and commit works in progress.