[IPython-User] PLEASE make autosave standard

[Zoltán Vörös]

On 11/07/2012 10:55 AM, Tom wrote:
> The take-home message from your response is that iPython Notebooks are 
> not going to get any form of autosave or crash protection any time 
> soon, and that if there is data loss from crashes, you consider it the 
> user's fault.
>
> Since there hasn't been any other response to this, I assume that's 
> official iPython policy.
>
> Thanks for taking the time to clarify this.
>
> Tom

I don't think that that is the official IPython policy, in fact, in 
https://github.com/ipython/ipython/issues/1378 this issue is flagged as 
high-priority. However, as it was pointed out in issue 1378, and as 
Matthias explained it in his e-mail, the problem is far from trivial, 
and there seems to be no solution that would cover all use cases. Also, 
you should understand that IPython is a hobby project in the sense that 
people work on it in their free time, the your problem might not be of 
the highest importance at the moment. Especially, as it was also pointed 
out several times, you can hit Cntr-S to save your work. It seems a bit 
odd that you lambast the developers for not doing more, and at the same 
time, you are reluctant to hit a single key every 10 minutes...

On more constructive note, if you just want to have something that works 
for you, on your computer locally, then you could easily hack the 
javascript code. The easiest option would probably be to link the 
"write-to-disc" operation to the execute_selected_cell() function in 
notebook.js, and then you wouldn't even have to tamper with timers. All 
you have to do is to add  that.save_notebook(); to execute_selected_cell().

Cheers,
Zoltán