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If a user has the habit of frequently quitting the program with unsaved changes, with their brain clicking through the "discard changes?" dialog in auto-pilot m
by chongli 4y ago
If a user has the habit of frequently quitting the program with unsaved changes, with their brain clicking through the "discard changes?" dialog in auto-pilot mode, it is next to impossible to distinguish that case from a situation in which it was done without intent, causing unwanted loss of data.
This problem was solved in MacOS X Lion 11 years ago. The solution is to get rid of this dialog entirely and to simply auto-save documents by default when quitting and to re-open all documents when the application is started again (persistent state). This feature applies even to new documents which have never been explicitly saved by the user nor even given a name. Only when you attempt to close (or explicitly save) an unnamed document does it ask you to choose a name or delete the document (with an explicit delete button marked in red text).
This also has the added benefit that when you use the save command (command-s) you're actually saving a snapshot of your document which you can recover later with a time-machine like history viewer interface. Otherwise, all other changes to your document since the last snapshot are auto-saved.
- chopin 4y agoNotepad++ does it the same way which I quite like.