Autosave as revision

[Duncan Kolba]

Files should be autosaved into a seperate file after every change, similar to google docs.

[Bruno Bord (brunobord)]

We're currently discussing the autosave issue.
In my personal opinion, I really don't think autosave should be _that_ complicated ; it would be nothing but re-implementing a "source code manager", "a la" wiki, or "a la" bzr/git/hg, etc.
This program is just about writing ; and not managing revisions / file system organisation.

We'll see if we set this bug as "won't fix", I'd like to take advices from others

[Peter Frost (slimeypete)]

Part of "just writing" is being able to ignore manual file-/revision-management (as far as possible). The user shouldn't have to worry about that sort of thing.

I'm in favour of this functionalty being included as long as we can provide a sensible, intuitive interface to it so that the user doesn't have to puzzle over which file they need to open in order to get at a specific revision.

I think a possible solution would be to implement a standard autosave, but also allow the user to "checkpoint" a file by hitting a keyboard shortcut. Then when the user opens the file it should ask them which version they want (with the default being "latest revision"). This probably wouldn't be too tricky to implement, and certainly wouldn't be as complex as a "proper" revision-management system.

[Duncan Kolba (dkolba)]

Indeed, autosave functionality makes things more complicated, however, IMHO it should be included even if not enabled by default. Editing a text over a longer period of time (e.g. months or even years) often leads to situations where one wants to go back in time and use a phrase, paragraph or whatever of an earlier version. This could be easily done by copy-pasting the respective files before one starts editing, but this is a not a very elegant solution. Implementing it but making it optional by default seems like a good choice to me.

[Adam Rooke (abelianr)]

Would be a nice feature to have, maybe it is something that can be implemented at a later date.

[Florian Heinle (tiax)]

I'm closing this as wontfix and tagging it as plugin-idea for future review.

I think using bzr/hg/whatever as a backend via their APIs might be a neat idea for a plugin.