Not so different from Word/Excel/Lotus 1-2-3 from the 90s! I like that most software saves-as-I-type now, but that was the workflow back then. Ctrl+S was the most used key combo on my keyboard back then. Now, it's `:w<Enter>`.

My god this comment made me feel old.

God forbid you have to remember to save your work!

The mental model my kids have for work is that typing or even thinking is itself a finished product. For my generation that idea of a conscious action of saving your work on a computer made me think more about what I was doing and how I was doing it. But I am an old.

If you go back in time, there were editors that by default would save the previous version of a file to .bak, each time you saved the current status. The fear of accidental saving or editing and hence overwriting old good stuff was higher than accidentally loosing new good stuff. There was less protection of system files, config files etc, so chances were you would brick apps or even the OS. Things got more forgiving since.

I understand the overall contrast you're sketching here. But can you elaborate on

> typing or even thinking is itself a finished product

Any specific examples where you notice the difference?

Do you really long for that?

It's been over 20 year with auto-save being pretty common, one has to adapt to the modern times, especially when it makes things better.

I don't have to "remember to save my work" when I write on my notepad, why should it be different on a computer?

> Do you really long for that?

Yes, absoultely. Saving data you don't want saved and overwriting data you want to retain are just as bad as not saving data you want to keep.

Keeping a scratch file to restore from unexpected applications exits (crash, power loss, etc.) is fine but beyond that I expect to be in control of when and where things are saved.

> one has to adapt to the modern times

I expect my computers to adapt to my requirements, not the other way around.

> especially when it makes things better.

Modern rarely equals better.

Neither save strategy is 'the better one'. Next step would be that git auto-commits...

Wait until you discover pen and paper.

At my first job, one of my responsibilities was to write the product manuals. My boss would set a timer next to me and instruct me to ctrl-S every time it went off.

Corrective action from having lost work too many times :-)

I wouldn't say it was totally awful. At least, prior to having an Undo option or perhaps an undo but that can only go back 3 steps, saving as before making any large changes was a pretty common workflow. I might end up with 50 versions of a document numbered incrementally by the time I was finished. that is still a necessary workflow for certain types of documents. I don't necessarily want everything saved automatically all the time.

I love my paper notebook to save everything automatically, I don't long for it to all disappear if I forget to press a button and give it a name.

You can get the browser to confirm you want to close the tab. That's what I did with my little single-file scrapbook thing: http://kaimac.org/posts/scrapbook/index.html

Yes, is that a no-go? Maybe I’m just being too old-school :)

It does make forks a lot easier, though!

Another advantage is that it makes it clear what you’re saving, reducing the likelihood of errors being persisted.

There is a pretty newish filesystem API around. You could probably make auto saving possible via that - at least after a prompt for the filesystem permission.

Or keeping it as it. That's fine too. It just came to mind

You could combine localStorage and manual save. Anything unsaved goes to localStorage, on save write to html and clear local storage. Best of both worlds?

If you construct the file to be able to save a copy of itself with updated data, then it can do so automatically without any user interaction, either on a timer or in response to some event.

I mean, that’s what I have to do in vim, so why not?