9 ms·
This reminds me of early versions of Microsoft Word. Edit: And more generally, DOS, FAT and CHKDSK. You never knew, when there was a power interruption -- or
by mirimir 7y ago
This reminds me of early versions of Microsoft Word.
Edit: And more generally, DOS, FAT and CHKDSK.
You never knew, when there was a power interruption -- or when the system just crashed for whatever mysterious reason -- just how bad it would be. NTFS was such an improvement.
- julienreszka 7y agoaccurate
- H8crilA 7y agoIt just misses the feature where some of the deleted words can still be found in the saved file. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/02/19/why-are-the-microsoft-office-file-formats-so-complicated-and-some-workarounds/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/02/19/why-are-the-micros...
- jiggawatts 7y agoI still have a habit of pressing CTRL-S intermittently...
- mirimir 7y agoSo do I. Also the habit of saving multiple copies, as a revision history. Because Word occasionally wrote garbage to files, while crashing.
- dustfinger 7y agoConsider using org-mode [1] as your primary word processor and committing revisions to git. I recommend org-mode because org documents are saved as plain text and therefore can be easily diffed. org-mode can also be exported to many formats [2]. If you are concerned about how the look and feel of writing in plain text might impact your experience authoring a document, there are lots of editor specific tutorials for beautifying the presentation of org documents. Here is one such article on beautifying org documents in emacs [3]. Also, if you choose emacs as your editor and you are uncomfortable using git, then I recommend magit [4] because it makes git functionality highly discoverable. [1] https://orgmode.org/ https://orgmode.org/ [2] https://orgmode.org/manual/Exporting.html#Exporting https://orgmode.org/manual/Exporting.html#Exporting [3] http://www.howardism.org/Technical/Emacs/orgmode-wordprocessor.html http://www.howardism.org/Technical/Emacs/orgmode-wordprocess... [4] https://magit.vc/ https://magit.vc/
- mirimir 7y agoThanks. I mainly write in Geany, these days.
- dustfinger 7y agoWell then you are already writing in plain text. Why not use git for committing revisions rather than making backup copies on the file system?
- mirimir 7y agoIt is an interesting idea. But I'm more comfortable with stuff staying local, unless I explicitly put it online.
- bocklund 7y agogit is a local program that doesn’t require that you put anything online. It sounds like you might be unfamiliar with it and I suggest that you check it out - it might be just what you’re looking for!
- lostjohnny 7y agoI think everyone older than 30 does. I also have the habit of pressing it more than one time, every time I press it. I'm not even be sure that save will really save.
- larntz 7y agoIs this an age thing? I do the exact same thing. Every time I stop typing I hit ctrl-s between 2-5 times. I don't eve think about it anymore. My kids are getting to the age where they are doing projects on a computer and I'm constantly telling them to "save early, save often." I guess it's some form of PTSD from computing in the 90's.
- Chirael 7y agoI worked at the help desk when I was in college back in the 90s and our mantra to users (and ourselves) was “save often and make backups”. We figured the more people we could inculcate that practice into, the fewer “I’ve been writing all afternoon and the computer just crashed, I can get my work back, right?” and “My only copy of my thesis was on this floppy and now I’m getting a disk read error, you can fix it, right?” visits we’d get that would end in tears.
- stevewodil 7y agoIt's not an age thing I don't think. I'm 22 and after I finish any tiny section of code I format it and then save. I don't know why, it's just habit now
- astrodust 7y agoYeah, but do you save several times before you're finished that tiny section?
- stevewodil 7y agoSeveral times? No, just saving once is sufficient.
- rocqua 7y agoOnce, when I was using inDesign, I unlearned this behavior. Saving would take about 10 seconds. 3 hours later... Now, I save whenever I am happy with a single edit.
- DeusExMachina 7y agoIn university, we did programming exams on machines with no hard disks, which booted from DOS floppy disks. The teacher recommended at the beginning of the exam to save often, especially before running our programs, because if they got stuck, we would have to reboot, losing everything. Of course, there was still a guy that typed for a whole hour without saving. Upon running his program, it obviously crashed and he lost all his work. I got the habit of saving constantly pressing ctrl-s ever since. I do it even in apps that don't save anything, getting annoying sounds from my computer.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- alok-g 7y agoI have seen saving causing a crash! :-(
- namelosw 7y agoMan, this is so true. At least several times a week I press Command-S and unintentionally saved HTML from browser. I even have a script to delete all HTML in my Download folder.
- mirimir 7y agoYeah, do that too.
- owl57 7y agoFunny. I also press ctrl-s in Firefox quite a bit, but for a completely different reason: in Emacs that shortcut invokes search.
- smhenderson 7y agoI like how Firefox uses / for search like Vim. I also find myself hitting ctrl-s in Firefox in an online ERP system we use when I really need to find and hit an Export To... button. I sit there for about two seconds staring at the Save As dialog wondering where it came from. Been using this system for over two years now but I still find myself doing it at least once a week.
- classic959 7y agoUsing kdenlive for video editing on Linux has served has a good reminder many times to save often. Cloud and mobile apps are often very good at taking this task away from a user, but it's worth remembering to take responsibility for saving/backing up files that have value. Even clouds can get blown away some times.
- _the_inflator 7y agoYes, and browsing through the TMP folders in hopes of finding some temporary savings of your data. :D
- meerita 7y agoSame here... so many bad memories of losing 2 hours of writing school works.
- rodolphoarruda 7y agoLast week my colleague and I were sharing screens while he was writing a document. 10 minutes in and some good wording put into the document I asked him: "Are you saving this?". He answered, "yes, I do Ctrl+S while typing, I mean, between words". And I couldn't even notice it. That's level 5 in the craze scale.
- tomjen3 7y agoI still do that, even when I write in google docs. But then again I don't think it was more than a month ago that some coworker lost work because Photo Shop crashed and they hadn't saved in a while.
- FerretFred 7y agoBetter than CTRL-C though. We used to have an Microfocus COBOL app (in the twin-floppy days) that would happily let you spend the entire day entering data, then fail to trap an accidental CTRl-C (it's close to "S", obvs). The developers had never allowed for that. Soul destroying..
- gmueckl 7y agoAnd then you work on an interface like Confluence's page editor where for no good reason, Ctrl+S is mapped to exiting the edior. It saves your edits in the background while you type, so you don't lose anything. But you get interrupted in a big way. Changing that would be trivial, but Atlassian deprioritized it to the bottom of the stack.
- _underfl0w_ 7y agoThat one unorthodox hotkey mapping is just the tip of the iceberg. Confluence's interface is a super special, highly unique dumpster fire of an editor. God forbid anyone actually know what Markdown syntax is. Plus, you can only disable some of the hotkeys - you're stuck with several awkward site-wide ones. There's an open Atlassian support ticket filled with souls wistfully begging for the ability to disable ALL Confluence hotkeys. I hope they fired the intern that wrote it.
- gmueckl 7y agoOn the contrary, Atlassian PMs who actually respond to these requests seem to consistently double down on the status quo.
- Someone 7y agoOutlook for Windows has alt-S and control-Return mapped to ‘Send’. The Mac version ‘betters’ that by using command-S and command-Return. Luckily, one can change that.
- markbnj 7y ago>> I still have a habit of pressing CTRL-S intermittently... I still do it reflexively after every significant change.
- 1337biz 7y agoSome online editors are still struggling with that. Lost a whole day of work just because I had an IP change and Thrive Architect for Wordpress did not save my edits.
- seandougall 7y agoYup. A few years ago I tried to reduce my dependence on the computer by writing more things down by hand, only to discover my left hand had developed a nervous tic that resulted in me attempting to hit command-S on the paper.
- foobiekr 7y agoMy wife is a user of Illustrator and Photoshop. A high cadence routine of SaveAs and Command-S on a regular basis has saved her from having to re-do hours of work so, so many times in 2019 alone.
- bromuro 7y agoI always press it. Now it formats my code too!
- arethuza 7y agoI can remember Word on SCO Xenix from around '89 or so which I don't think was particularly unstable.
- mirimir 7y agoIn '89, I was on DOS. It was unstable.
- ubermonkey 7y agoI don't remember Word for DOS (say, 5.0) being especially unstable AT ALL.
- reirob 7y agoNow I am really surprised. I knew that Xenix was a Unix that belonged to Microsoft, but I didn't know Word worked on a Unix. And I didn't know that Xenix was bought by SCO later. Looked up wikipedia on Xenix [0], and there are a lot of interesting facts in there, that for me put some aspects of the PC and Unix history in new lights. For example: "Microsoft hopes that XENIX will become the preferred choice for software production and exchange", the company stated in 1981.[8] Microsoft referred to its own MS-DOS as its "single-user, single-tasking operating system",[31] and advised customers that wanted multiuser or multitasking support to buy XENIX.[31][32] It planned to over time improve MS-DOS so it would be almost indistinguishable from single-user XENIX, or XEDOS, which would also run on the 68000, Z8000, and LSI-11; they would be upwardly compatible with XENIX, which BYTE in 1983 described as "the multi-user MS-DOS of the future".[33][34] Microsoft's Chris Larson described MS-DOS 2.0's XENIX compatibility as "the second most important feature".[35] His company advertised DOS and XENIX together, listing the shared features of its "single-user OS" and "the multi-user, multi-tasking, UNIX-derived operating system", and promising easy porting between them. AT&T started selling System V,[37] however, after the breakup of the Bell System. Microsoft, believing that it could not compete with UNIX's developer, decided to abandon XENIX. The decision was not immediately transparent, which led to the term vaporware.[38] It agreed with IBM to develop OS/2,[4] and the XENIX team (together with the best MS-DOS developers)[citation needed] was assigned to that project. In 1987, Microsoft transferred ownership of XENIX to SCO in an agreement that left Microsoft owning slightly less than 20% of SCO (this amount prevented both companies from having to disclose the exact amount in the event of a SCO IPO). When Microsoft eventually lost interest[clarification needed] in OS/2 as well, the company based its further high-end strategy on Windows NT." [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix
- yitchelle 7y agoexactly the reason why my autosave period is set to 1min.
- sirsuki 7y agoAnd Vim and Emacs users laugh uncontrollably. History has yet to learn.
- bromuro 7y agoHow does NTFS fix the save problem? I thought this auto-save thing was introduced in MacOS first few years ago...
- mirimir 7y agoNTFS fixed the file system corruption issue. As I vaguely recall, it typically went like this. You're editing some document. Something bad happens, and the system goes down. You reboot, and get the CHKDSK prompt. If you cancel out, sometimes your document is corrupted. If you run CHKDSK, sometimes your document is entirely gone. Unless you've been saving a revision history.