Autosave without saving many undo states is equally dangerous.

Not saying the iPhone does anything in a bad way (I have no clue) - but I've hardly been bitten by losing unsaved work because I'm deliberately using ctrl-c very often.

That's why many people (I first read about this in Alan Cooper's About Face 2.0) advocating for automatic save also advocate for unlimited undo (or at least something close to it) because closing a document and not saving it is just a form of undo while closing a document and saving it should be the default action.

This is also a place where the desktop metaphor (with paper documents) around which most WIMP systems are built exposes computer details and fails to stick to its metaphoric roots. When I scribble something on paper it's there and I don't have to consciously remember to somehow commit a transient state of my scribbling to paper explicitly.

After some incidents in my shool years, I've noticed that I unconciously tend to hit ctrl-s every few dozen keystrokes without even noticing it.

Good software doesn't lose anything ever, but even with "average" (i.e., unacceptably bad if you think about it critically) tools I've had sudden power cuts where I lost just a few words because of this habit.

> After some incidents in my shool years, I've noticed that I unconciously tend to hit ctrl-s every few dozen keystrokes without even noticing it.

That is exactly how I learned too. Years later, ctrl-s is still a reflex action.

I realised I have passed some kind of milestone - I read that and thought "search"

Thank you :-)

Totally necessary when the early PCs would just die on you because you pushed a key.