<div class="gmail_quote">On 6 November 2012 23:50, Jon Wilson <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:jsw@fnal.gov" target="_blank">jsw@fnal.gov</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div text="#000000" bgcolor="#FFFFFF">
<div>It might not be too difficult to
implement a switch (in user profile, or per-notebook, or whatever)
that turns autosaving on and off. Then those who like autosave
have it, and those who don't like it, don't have it.<br></div></div></blockquote><div><br>Making it configurable might be a good starting point - if it's not on by default, we can set the quality bar slightly lower.<br>
<br>I don't think it's impossible to have a good autosave feature. It sounds like the key is that the autosave shouldn't clobber the manually saved file. Some of the other constraints:<br><br>- Bandwidth: I think we ultimately want to implement saving by transmitting a delta, which should help here.<br>
- Multiple instances open: This is complicated, but maybe it's possible to save each one separately, and offer all the different versions if it crashed.<br>- Keeping working directory clean: We could have an autosave folder in the IPython data directory.<br>
<br>This is all solvable, but it would be a significant expenditure of time and effort, and so far no-one's got round to doing it. We have a loose guideline that a badly implemented feature is often worse than leaving that feature out, so I doubt we'd merge a simple save-timer callback by default.<br>
<br>Perhaps it's better to focus on reducing the need for autofocus. As others have said, Ctrl+S should work in all browsers to save the notebook. The original post also mentions problems with long output, and I remember discussions about better ways to deal with that - although I'm not sure that's been translated into code yet.<br>
<br>Thanks,<br>Thomas<br></div></div>