This is about the most recent version of LibreOffice on Windows 10. I can’t speak for other versions.
My daughter worked hard on her social studies essay. I type things in for her because she’s a really bad typist, but she tells me what to write… but I didn’t remember to manually save her social studies essay yesterday, and for some reason the ThinkPad rebooted, LibreOffice crashed and we lost the whole thing… because autosave was not automatically on when I installed it.
No, recovery didn’t work. We just got a blank file.
I rewrote it for her based on the information we had and what I remembered and tried to make it sound like what a 13-year-old would write because it was basically my fault and she did do the work. I did have her sit with me as I wrote it in case she didn’t like something I wrote, but it was sort of cheating. I’m okay with that cheating since I know she worked hard on it.
First, though, I went into the settings and turned on autosave.
I like LibreOffice, but why the hell is that not on automatically? Honestly, I don’t really understand why someone wouldn’t want their documents autosaved, but I’m pretty sure most people would want that.
This isn’t fucking 1993. I shouldn’t have to remember to save a document anymore and it shouldn’t be lost forever because of it.
Like I said, I like LibreOffice. I don’t really want to trust documents to Microsoft or Google. But this was really annoying.
This thread is absolutely terrible. I’m very sorry op. As a software dev, I think I’ve hit the save button maybe ten times in the past 2 years. You are right that it should auto save by default. That’s just required in this day and age. People saying they don’t want auto save because they don’t want cats losing their work literally do not understand how auto save works in the vast majority of modern systems. A simple example is Google sheets, where you can literally see every change made to every character in every file throughout time. You’re not going to lose anything. Software devs solved this in their own tools literally decades ago. My job is literally editing text files all day long. I can’t remember the last time I lost data due to a crash or a cat or anything.
Some people even mention LaTeX which literally has a solution with Overleaf. If software doesn’t autosave in this day and age, it’s shit software.
What you have here is another case of Linux users jumping to defend the only things they have to defend, even if it’s absolute shit.
Man, maybe I just grew up in a different time and/or environment but I still to this day manually save obsessively. I use VSCode most days and feel like I’m constantly hitting the save hotkey. With that said though, I am just not a fan of most autosaves. I like to know what the current contents are and whether or not I have unsaved changes.
That’s just me though.
Yeah, I don’t trust the auto save to save my work properly. I work as a Software Engineer, and any small change I make, even if I’m not done with the change and I’m just thinking, my hands immediately default to CTRL+S.
Always always make sure your work is being saved if it means something to you. Especially since windows will force update and reboot your computer. Battery’s can die, power can go out and your computer shuts down. Applications can and will crash.
Why do you trust ctrl-s though? You are a software engineer, you know that a bug in the piece of code that saves the document would affect both calls, regardless of whether its invoked by a timer or by the end user pressing keys, right?
I mean we have all been bitten by op’s problem In the past but it was exactly the same issue, autosave not enabled (most likely didn’t exist) what’s with all these, I don’t trust software to do it’s job so I do things by hand?
Particularly from software developers or other technical users. Found a bug in a piece of software, report it, you don’t need to change your behaviour for the next 20 years and tell everyone anecdotes about you still don’t trust a regression.
ctrl-S is deeper, older code. And yes, a bug in that would affect both manual and automatic saving. Meaning the bug has greater exposure and therefore would be detected faster.
More easily detectable bugs are less of a problem, because lack of alarm indicates lack of those bugs.
It’s this: (P => Q) => (!Q => !P)
Basically P is the bug existing and Q is someone detecting it. The more powerful the implication arrow on the left side of that equation, the more powerful the implication arrow on the right side. Or if you prefer probabilities: a greater conditional probability on the left means a greater conditional probability on the right.
Worse bugs that affect more systems are less worthy of the user’s attention.
If current_time > x invoke deper,older code that you somehow trust
Alternatively, more modern implementation suggested by someone else in this thread
At every keystroke, invoke deeper older code that you somehow trust
While not impossible, pretty hard to slip a bug into something like that and if it happens it gets identified,reported and fixed like all bugs. Users tend to be quite vocal about data loss.
Also some software developers tend to overcomplicate things, this is not rocket science
Every single one of us has been bitten by auto save that didn’t work. I’ve personally lost hours worth of code to auto save glitches and poorly timed save runs. People don’t trust it because in the past it has had and/or caused problems with their workflow.
Ctrl+S is a manual confirmation that I saved it, and is a step taken before running any code, especially through a terminal in an IDE where if the auto save hasn’t kicked in will mean the changes aren’t reflected.
There’s a couple things… First, it’s a habit to be constantly pressing CTRL+S. I’ve been doing it for many years, I’ll continue to do it probably until I stop using a keyboard. It’s such an easy keystroke, since my hands are almost always hovering over the keyboard. Second, in some software you can create new documents without first creating a file on disk. This means that when I go to hit CTRL+S, it prompts me to save the file. That’s not to say that some software can’t save a recovery version of the document in the event the software crashes, but I’m not going to bet money on it working 100% of the time. I’d rather be proactive and personally make sure my work is saved. Gives me peace of mind.
I already covered your first point, you don’t need to.
As for your second point, autosave still does its job. The fact that you haven’t chosen a name and a folder for your document doesn’t mean that the software hasn’t created one on disk that keeps getting autosaved. When you decide to finally save the document, that file gets renamed and placed where you want it.
I mean this is trivial stuff that got solved a long time ago, I don’t see people on this thread saying I don’t trust electronic payments, I only write checks but somehow everyone think a basic feature is broken everywhere
Mmm. I grew up in a different time too. Makes me ponder how the software circumstances of that time built in us a very different idea of what an iteration actually is, when it comes to writing. The fact that we couldn’t go back and atomically dissect the history of a piece. That a draft, and an edit, were something heavier. Maybe we’d have to think a bit more slowly and carefully before irreversibly casting a previous version into the ether.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not making a “gen z bad” post. Just reflecting on how things are different these days, and maybe it leads to a different kind of work.
Lots of VSCode extensions appear to assume manual save is on, so if you have autosave, they spam notifications like crazy. “Ooh you have syntax error in your config, please fix this now >:(((((”
Notifications were what made me abandon vscode lol
So out of curiosity, what did you move to and do you use autosaving? I’m always willing to try out other text editors but it’ll take something impressive to make me start autosaving.
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I’ve never actually used vim, though occasionally fallback on vi for remote admin. I may finally check it out now though. Thanks!
I grew up in that different time too, but I completely agree with the person you’re replying to.
Auto save is a must. No arguments. You can have personal preferences and behaviours that make you want to disable autosaving and control your saves manually, that’s perfectly fine, but that’s you and your preference. A modern application should absolutely have autosaving enabled by default. Anything else is user unfriendly and indefensible.
No. I disagree. I should be in control. I do things at times that I do not want saved. If you have auto save then the only way is with historical commits.
Auto save has fucked me over too many times. Leave it off.
The ONLY way I can see us both being satisfied is to start each document with a save location and asking save, or auto save on the first save.
Nothing is stopping you from being in control. You can turn auto save off and set things up any which way you like. People have different preferences.
And yes, an application should absolutely ask for a file name and save location on document creation - that’s just good UX. Asking for those details when the user is ostensibly about to finish working is not helpful.
Oh for what it’s worth, I probably agree more with the fact that autosave should be on by default but also possible to disable.
But yes, I do have my preference and I admit it is just that, a preference.
Thank you! My God, the amount of holier-than-thou “it’s your own fault” in this thread is mildly infuriating in and of itself. Auto save and versioning have been a thing in Word for at least 8 years, probably over a decade but that’s the first version mentioned in their docs, and I struggle to think much software I use regularly that doesn’t have some form of it. Hell, even the new Notepad on Windows keeps your changes when it’s accidentally closed.
I like most open source software but this sort of attitude in the community and what seems like an absolute disdain for any UX concept from the past 20 years makes me very hesitant to recommend it almost anyone outside very specific technical circles.
People make mistakes, that’s why we automate things. If a system relies on a human not making mistakes it is doomed to fail eventually.
Saving manually should be a feature, but autoaave should be on by default these days, unless 30+ years of people losing work due to not hitting “save” manually has taught us nothing.
Crashes happen. Errors happen. Pets and children happen. Any major document editor should be able to auto save and replay a very long history of actions.
Improve the system, because you can’t improve people with a code patch.
It has taught us to take responsibility for saving our work
But a person can improve themselves before they can improve the software they work on. There’s less collaboration and centralized planning required for an individual solution to this problem.
I mean, it is? I don’t even use LibreOffice, but god I’m thinking of my help desk days and dealing with people getting angry at everything except themselves.
If people make a mistake occasionally or are willfully ignorant that’s a user issue. If almost everyone in this thread is talking about how you should push a button every 5 seconds on a machine designed to automate tasks maybe that’s a design issue.
If it were every 5 seconds, that would make sense for a cron job. If it’s “every time you’ve achieved a sense of satisfaction with the writing” then having the human do it makes sense because it’s an even based trigger and the computer can’t see the event.
Funny how OP is using libreoffice on Windows though, what’s there Linux-related to defend? Did a Linux user hurt you? If anything this is another opportunity for some snarky comment about Windows being shit and crashing for no reason since the 1990s.
Thank you.
“The year is 2024. Any car that doesn’t automatically brake when it encounters an obstacle is a shit car”
While the above may be true, it’s definitely not a reason to say:
“I shouldn’t have to use my brakes”