help-gnu-emacs
[Top][All Lists]
Advanced

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: What's your favourite *under_publicized* editing feature ofEmacs?


From: Eli Zaretskii
Subject: Re: What's your favourite *under_publicized* editing feature ofEmacs?
Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2011 20:06:36 +0200

> From: Cthun <cthun_117@qmail.net.au>
> Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2011 10:13:16 -0500
> 
> Ah, auto-save, another fruitful source of trouble.
> 
> Auto-save has two design alternatives. One, it just acts like the user 
> hit control-S, every some interval.
> 
> This runs into trouble if you do something drastic you later want to 
> undo. Sure you can fork the file, but if you forget ... and then there's 
> forking it "dangerously" -- first you make a big deletion, and then you 
> hit alt, f, a for save-as to save the drastically-changed version under 
> a new name, but pow, an autosave happens to occur *after* the deletion 
> and *before* the save-as. So much for being able to undo it...

Please read the Emacs manual: when you make a drastic change, Emacs
disables auto-save (and tell you about that), until you re-enable it.

> The other option is auto-save to some temporary file, or a sequence of 
> numbered files. Of course if you have a power outage or something now 
> you have to go hunting for where the darn thing saved these. Depending, 
> they may even be vulnerable to being erased by an automatic temp file 
> cleanup script before you get to them.

Please read the manual: Emacs places the auto-save files in the same
directory where the original file lives, so it won't be erased by
cleanup jobs.  Emacs also automatically finds the auto-save file when
you visit the original file again, and suggests to recover the edits
from there.



reply via email to

[Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread]