Goodbye, Ctrl-S 521
An anonymous reader writes "'Save your work!' — This was a rallying cry for an entire generation of workers and students. The frequency and unpredictability of software crashes, power outages, and hardware failures made it imperative to constantly hit that save button. But in 2014? Not so much. My documents are automatically saved (with versioning) every time I make a change. My IDE commits code changes automatically. Many webforms will save drafts of whatever data I'm entering. Heck, even the games I play have an autosave feature. It's an interesting change — the young generation will grow up with an implicit trust that whatever they type into a computer will stay there. Maybe this is my generation's version of: 'In my day, we had to get up and walk across the room to change the channel on the TV!' In any case, it has some subtle but interesting effects on how people write, play, and create. No longer do we have to have constant interruptions to worry about whether our changes are saved — but at the same time, we don't have that pause to take a moment and reflect on what we've written. I'm sure we've all had moments where our hands hover over a save/submit button before changing our minds and hammering the backspace key. Maybe now we'll have to think before we write."
Never used this keystroke (Score:5, Funny)
I've been using computers for over 30 years and have never once used this keystroke.
Re:Never used this keystroke (Score:5, Funny)
I've been using computers for over 30 years and have never once used this keystroke.
In 30 years you've never produced anything worth saving? That's quite a feat.
Re:Never used this keystroke (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Never used this keystroke (Score:5, Interesting)
the whole thing is just weird and to tell you the truth it made me stop using the apple programs so I never got used to it or fully figured it out.
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I used to be a Mac fan.
That's sad. Because now I'm not. Apple seems to only care about new gizmos and animating everything, rather than sticking with creating useful and predictable interfaces.
Ive is the worst thing for the UI that I've ever seen. It's soul deadening.
Re:Never used this keystroke (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not just apple, Microsoft and everyone else is catering to the dumb.
Remove features, hide "advanced" things. etc.. the MOST frustrating app in the world is MS word... i spend more time undoing what it is trying to help me with than anything else. why cant I have a single option, "Expert mode" that disabled ALL the freaking help shit and un-hides all functions?
Re:Never used this keystroke (Score:4, Interesting)
Replacing a 3-step process (Command-Shift-S; Type new filename, Hit Enter) with a 7-step process (Close file [to ensure your changes are saved, since you can no longer do this manually]; Copy file; Rename copy; Reopen the file; Click File -> Revert To -> Browse All Versions; Find the version you want to revert to; Click Restore).
Alternately, you can restore the old revision as a new file (the opposite workflow) in 5-steps (Click File -> Revert To -> Browse All Versions; Find the version you want; Option-Click Restore a Copy; Enter new filename; Click Save).
Of course, Apple's own documentation [apple.com] does imply that the "Save" option still exists. It is there in TextEdit, but I can't confirm this for any other Apple apps under Mavericks.
Bravo, Apple... Bravo.
Re:Never used this keystroke (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Never used this keystroke (Score:4, Informative)
Another thing Apple screwed up was dropping the 17" MBP line. 17" Retina MBP? Yes, please. Even if it's the same resolution as the 15", making the pixels just a hair bigger won't hurt; I like a slightly larger machine that can fit comfortably on my lap, without requiring that I keep my legs smashed together lest it fall between them, and has ample component spacing to allow for decent cooling, thank you very much. I'd love an upgrade, but they don't offer anything I find compelling anymore.
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I like my 17 inch MPBs, but they could never get the hinges right, and I think that is why they stopped making them. Both of mine (the first being a G4, the second an Intel from around 2010) eventually had the screen bevel crack near the hinges. Even before that it was impossible to use either of them in a reclining position, i.e. on your back with the laptop up on your knees and the screen pointed somewhat downwards, because the hinges didn't have enough internal friction to hold up the weight of the scree
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Re:Never used this keystroke (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Never used this keystroke (Score:4, Informative)
:x for me.
[John]
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:x for me.
[John]
From an early 90's email signature:
[ctrl]-x[ctrl]-s then [ctrl]-x[ctrl]-w newfilename
Go ahead and flame me, you vi folks. I don't mind.
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Sometimes the challenge with Ctrl-S was that you often didn't know if it did anything, and you found yourself going to the File menu to see if the Save button was grey, or to click it more than a few times "just to be sure."
Trusting that your Google Doc was saved without hitting a button, or that a draft of your email was auto-generated takes a bit of trust that takes a while to build.
If you're not a heavy user, it'll take time to build that trust.
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And does that make you feel special? Better than the rest of us? Or what?
Bah, we already said goodbye to CTRL-S years ago.. (Score:5, Funny)
When it stopped meaning "Suspend output to terminal" along with it's partner CTRL-Q.
In-Band serial flow control ftw!
G.
Re:Bah, we already said goodbye to CTRL-S years ag (Score:4, Insightful)
That's honestly the first thing I thought of. "Saving a document" to me is "Esc-:w".
Re:Bah, we already said goodbye to CTRL-S years ag (Score:4, Informative)
Esc-ZZ
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Only if you're finished. If you're still working but want to save your progress, :w is what you want.
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:w
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Derr, nevermind. You were saying the same thing. The - threw me off.
rubbish (Score:2)
ctrl-S is still alive and well and suspending most things.
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Re:rubbish (Score:4, Funny)
I've been pronouncing it wrong all these years.
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*whoosh*. It was a joke.
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Did this just happen?
Ctrl-S/Ctrl-Q still work in my terminal windows. I'm not sure how useful it is as my response time can be slow enough that it doesn't usually let me stop the text display in time when I see something I want to take a closer look at. (Setting up a whopping big scrollback memory helps with that, though.)
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(Setting up a whopping big scrollback memory helps with that, though.)
One of my biggest gripes with most modern terminals, the scrollback buffer is uselessly small in the default configuration. Mac OS X is the only system where I don't feel the need to modify it literally the first time I do "cat /var/log/something"
Memory is not an issue for a graphical terminal on a desktop. There's no good reason for terminals to be defaulting to 200 lines anymore.
I'd rather not use (Score:2)
a text editor that is so error prone that *needs* to autosave constantly("continuously"). Or software in general, for that matter.
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a text editor that is so error prone that *needs* to autosave constantly("continuously"). Or software in general, for that matter.
You've got it backwards--it ain't an error-prone text editor, it's an error-prone human. Even conscientious, process-driven users make stupid mistakes and forget to save their work (especially when they're on a roll.) This protects us from ourselves, not the machines we're working on.
Now, you may be among that handful of people who never forgets to save--in which case, I congratulate you on being in one of the outlier cohorts that software engineers really shouldn't ever spend their time worrying about. :D
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Old habits die hard - I still find myself repeating the mantra "save early, save often".
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I used to be in the group of people that didn't save often.... at least until I owned a box that would bluescreen randomly.... and frequently. Amazing how that has changed my habits forever.
Now I have the problem of auto-saving breaking my shit.
If I open a doc and start changing it, I may want to save it as a different file completely. Problem is, autosave has overwritten theoriginal file. (admittedly this has only happened once, and it was a not so great application).
Now if I am changing a doc, the first t
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Perhaps you've heard of a thing called a power outage. I just had one last night. Or maybe you've had a cat step on your keyboard and somehow manage to close the window you were working in. There are enough acts of god and human error that still exist regardless of how flawless the program you're working in is to make autosave highly valuable. The 1000 times you don't need autosave are not nearly as critical as the 1 time you do.
Re:I'd rather not use (Score:5, Funny)
Perhaps you've heard of a thing called a power outage.
That's where you reboot and the file is full of garbage because it crashed half-way through writing the new file to disk and the metadata was updated but not the contents, right?
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This is a solved problem: Office e.g. does a merry dance when saving files (save, then rename) to avoid exactly this problem, since it used to be such a big issue around 2000.
You can protect against user error; you can protect against Acts of God; but I remain unconvinced you can protect against Acts of Cat.
UPS (Score:2)
Perhaps you've heard of a thing called a power outage. I just had one last night.
Your laptop's battery or your desktop's UPS should have kept the machine running long enough for an orderly shutdown.
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Or, more likely, your hand would brush against the RESET key that was prominently featured on the keyboard right below RETURN.
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Back in my day, computers would fail for no explicable reason.
My favorite unexplained error message from back in the mid 1980s was from tcsh, "Assertion botch: This can't happen!"
Saved, with conditions . . . (Score:3, Informative)
Good! (Score:5, Funny)
Correction (Score:2)
Re:Correction (Score:5, Funny)
Oh god, please don't tell me this is going to be the year of the Emacs Desktop?
If so I may just consider getting a job as a gardener....
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Hold out for the EmacsBook Pro, I hear it will have a bigger screen and the processor might, I say might, just be enough to keep up with Emacs.
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No, they meant Ctrl-X , Y
One problem with auto saving (Score:2)
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Carl-s
It's only pronounced that way. When writing we still use "Ctrl".
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Carl-s
It's only pronounced that way. When writing we still use "Ctrl".
Gotta luv speal cheakers...
Commits code changes automatically (Score:5, Insightful)
TFA doesn't mention this and, if the summary writer meant "commit" as in version control commit, this would be a killer bug in the whole process.
Version control is not meant to be used as a backup, every commit should be deliberate, reviewed and well explained in the comments. Vide the post mortem of the heartbleed bug (or many other similar ones).
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Auto-commit is probably overkill, but: distributed source control.
I commit to my local branch at every semi-reasonable checkpoint, and yeah, after a while my commit messages look like those from that XKCD about git. Every so often I'll push to a private remote branch as a backup.
Then when I squash my commits and push the atomic change to the main repo, yeah, that will be a deliberate, reviewed and well explained commit. But only then.
We're not all on SVN and SourceSafe anymore!
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Version control is not meant to be used as a backup, every commit should be deliberate, reviewed and well explained in the comments. Vide the post mortem of the heartbleed bug (or many other similar ones).
Only if you have the ancient, outdated, bad, deprecated, idiotic, CVS view of version control. To quote Linus "if you still use CVS, you're stupid, and probably ugly". Hopefully no one still does, but that "branching is expensive" mindset persists.
A commit is precisely a backup, nothing more. A way to make you your work survive dropping your laptop. A merge back into a real branch should be the point of careful review.
Back in *my* day... (Score:2)
...control-S (XOFF) was used to pause the scrolling on a "dumb" CRT terminal. I don't think I have ever used it to save a document.
Systems I care about (i.e. anything I use for "real work") are on UPSes. If the hardware or software is unstable enough that it crashes unexpectedly more often than once every couple of months (give or take), I fix/replace the hardware or start looking for alternative software to accomplish the same task.
Ctrl-S? Ain't nobody got time for that! (Score:4, Informative)
I'm busy F4'ing.
You missed the biggest downside (Score:5, Insightful)
"You can use the 'undo' command they say..."
Yes but the undo command isn't persistent between applications, much less a power failure.
You haven't solved anything, you've merely shifted the problem.
Auto-save is NOT your friend (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Auto-save is NOT your friend (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Auto-save is NOT your friend (Score:5, Insightful)
A properly implemented auto-save feature does not overwrite the original document; it saves a secondary copy, to be used only if the system crashes and you need to recover your edits.
This is what MS Office does. Of course, no one here uses MS Office, so that's not much help...
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So instead of making things easier, we've added complexity to work around complexity.
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Sometimes, I don't want to save. I will open a document with the explicit purpose of making changes that I don't want saved. Even Gmail's autosave has burned me pretty badly. I spent an hour typing out a very long email. Toward the end of it, something happened, and the whole body of text was gone. I'm still not really sure if it was a keyboard shortcut I inadvertently triggered, browser bug, or what. But I just thought "no biggie... I'll just go back to the auto-saved version". So I open up the autosaved version, and the latest auto-save happened AFTER the email body was deleted.
Ctrl-Z my friend. Undo works perfectly fine in many web forms (including Gmail) when you accidentally select a bunch of text and overwrite it. My wife almost cried when she thought she lost the text from a huge email to a relative she hadn't seen in a while, but luckily I was there when it happened or else she would have given up.
I just tested it and undo works on Slashdot comment fields on IE, FF, and Chrome on Windows 7, and I know it works in Linux because I use it all the time at home.
Wow, déjà vu (Score:5, Interesting)
A relic of spinning rust (Score:2)
Back in the day, I/O was dreadfully slow. Think about 5 1/4" and 3 1/2" floppy disks and slow hard disks, and how long it could take to save a document. I can still hear the clunking and whirring in my head as the little activity LED blinks and the operating system grinds to a halt.
Now, with faster HDDs and even better SSDs, making "save" a separate, user-triggered operation doesn't make much sense. And with a jillion cores, you can easily offload the CPU work to do the saving to another thread so the UI is
Can you undo a change you made before a reboot? (Score:4, Insightful)
Look at iOS - how many apps have a "save" button at all? It's expressly discouraged from the Human Interface Guidelines
With no Save, how do you Revert? Or do Apple's Human Interface Guidelines for iOS expect applications to offer unlimited undo/redo that persists across reboots of the device?
Kids these days (Score:5, Funny)
Excuses that no longer work:
My floppy disc isn't working
My computer blue screened before I saved
My e-mail was down
I don't know why your computer can't read that format
Every excuse I ever used to get a day's reprieve could not work now.
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Excuses that do work:
I can't get into my account. .mp3 I renamed .doc isn't opening in word?
The internet is down.
What do you mean the
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Best mistake I ever made (Score:2)
Autosave still has not cured me. I will still CTRL-S every few lines. Even with autosave on CAD I will still do other save
Why would anyone do this? (Score:3)
No longer do we have to have constant interruptions to worry about whether our changes are saved
Why would you interrupt your flow of work to save a document? That doesn't make any sense whatsoever. What I got into the habit of doing was hitting Ctrl-S after each thought. The thought was then saved and I thinking about what to write next anyway. Autosave doesn't know when I actually want to commit my changes and it could happen in the middle of an edit (say cut and paste to move some text around). If I lost power at that time I would rather have the unedited version of the document than the one with my precious text cut out of it and then lost in the event of a power failure.
You insensitive clod! (Score:4, Insightful)
Apple users don't Control, they Command you insensitive clod!
Welcome to the 1980's... (Score:5, Informative)
Games: Autosave is the devil (Score:2, Insightful)
I can hear some people saying "It forces suspense in the game! You don't know when the next safe place is!". If you want that kind of suspense, let the game auto save for you. Personally if supper is ready I don't want to have to tell my wife
First noticed this in Google Docs (Score:2)
For public work docs we put together. I was trying to hit "Alt+F, S" to save everything for quite a while.
I personally don't like the change because not every piece of software behaves that way (yet), and that leads to confusion.
I also like having control over what is saved and when for a reason. Maybe I don't want some server having every thought I've ever had (and then deleted later because it was a bad idea, such as an angry email you never sent) stored somewhere in "Big Data". Imagine the psychological
Inspiration! (Score:2, Informative)
Many years ago, I lost some changes in a vi clone named "stevie". The real vi saved your changes automatically by the simple (and at the time necessary) method of using a file to store your edit buffer, but stevie used an in-memory edit buffer. After it losing enough changes from that, I decided to write my own vi clone, "elvis", which also used a file to store the edit buffer. This was very handy in the early days of Minix (predecessor to Linux) which had only a 64K address space per process -- it allow
Elder Scrolls (Score:2)
Obviously this guy isn't a fan of Bethesda games, if he thinks so highly of autosave.
Just wait until you lose an hour of progress because you didn't save before getting smoked by a high-level troll at the bottom of that dungeon.
That's the way I like it (Score:4, Funny)
Undo levels to zero, no saving. Live in the moment, on the edge. No turning back, it's all in.
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Also there's an electron gun pointed at your tower that triggers based on a geiger counter. The suspense!
All we need now is to involve a cat and poison somehow.
I guess this joke is now obsolete, then... (Score:3)
Jesus and Buddha sit down for a typing contest. Both are given a lengthy paper document, and have to type it into their respective computers. The contest starts, and they're neck-and-neck the whole way. When they're both almost done, a lightning bolt comes down from the sky, and both computers crash. Who wins the contest? Jesus, of course. Jesus saves.
Re:I guess this joke is now obsolete, then... (Score:4, Funny)
Buddha does incremental backups though..
*Crash* (Score:2)
Take your own advice (Score:2)
Maybe now we'll have to think before we write.
The very act of externalizing something is part of the writing process. The idea that one who might think it all out and then type/code/compose/whatever a perfectly formed document/program/concerto/whatever only really exists in the imaginary Mozart that lives in Peter Schaffer's mind.
Besides, I prefer to save my work at defined points. Just because the system can recreate what I was doing where I left off before that dead battery/power failure/segfault/system crash/emergency phone call doesn't necessarily
Disagree (Score:3)
I hate autosave. Its one of the first things I turn off in any editor.
Over many years I have developed an optimal workflow of trying changes and only saving when I'm completely happy with it, so by not saving I can easily go back to the last good version.
Autosave that saves at regular time periods or whatever totally ruins that. I don't want earlier versions automatically overwritten, especially with work-in-progress changes, nor do I want multiple versions saved so I then have the hassle of figuring out *which* version to go back to, and possibly on-top all the manual housekeeping of regularly having to manually clear out multiple old versions.
Should have been first post (Score:5, Funny)
I totally had first post on this one, but I found out I actually have to click both a preview button and submit button for it to save to this forum.
Been using it (Score:2)
since it was Commodore-s on GEOS.
I recently replayed th GameCube's Eternal Darkness (Score:3)
Comment removed (Score:3)
This article is drivel (Score:3)
CTRL-S still suspends scrolling on my terminal now just like it did in 1997 on Slackware. What nonsensical software is the author using?
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At First National Bank and Trust.
Re:CTRL+S (Score:4, Funny)
...passes to Moses...SCORE!
Re:CTRL+S (Score:4, Funny)
Jesus saves!
And takes half damage from the fireball.
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Re:IDE autocommit? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would anyone want to autocommit possibly broken code?
Re:IDE autocommit? (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe they work for Adobe?
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Glad to see that somebody else had my same thought. The fuck? The whole point of committing is that you wait until you're fairly certain it works before you do it.
*cue mob of angry pitchfork-wielding, git-battlescarred developers when your autocommitted nonfunctional code fucks over a merge*
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git checkout -b daily-grind
Auto commit while I'm working on code. Time to commit to the public repo.
git rebase
Now I squash all those things I was doing into one commit.
git checkout my-working-branch
git merge daily-grind
git push
Now my working code has been pushed into a repository that's not got automated stuff, and from there I issue a pull request or perhaps push it over SSH to a more centralized server. I could do that from the automated repo, on bigger projects to avoid multiple copies, but on smaller
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I think there might be an Eclipse option. We had a new guy once who had some IDE auto-committing. He had a ridiculous number of completely uninformative commits early on. Very quickly the top item on his task list became "Figure out how to disable auto-commit"