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Re:The curious case of disappearing Polish S by lmm on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @05:26AM (#8989629)
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.

Re:The curious case of disappearing Polish S by acqq on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @05:42AM (#8989659)
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.
Re:The curious case of disappearing Polish S by lmm on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @06:23AM (#8989762)
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.
Re:The curious case of disappearing Polish S by stephenboyd on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @05:22PM (#8993893)
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?

Re:The curious case of disappearing Polish S by lmm on Wednesday February 04, 2015 @03:33AM (#8995881)
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.