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It isn't rocket science any more...
...so could somebody please explain to me why there are still applications that allow you to lose your work due to a power glitch or a wrong keystroke?
A little history. When I was at the Stanford AI lab in 1970, there was a text editor that had a number of innovative features. One of those was the ability to automatically save your file after some number of keystrokes. The number was normally 100, but you could set it. The day that the computer was going down every 5 minutes, I set the save count down to 5 and got useful work done.
A little later I was working at Xerox PARC. There was a programming system called Interlisp that had an automatic spelling corrector and infinite undo (including both the ability to undo the spelling "corrections" that turned out to be wrong, and the ability to select which operations you wanted to undo.
That was nearly four decades ago, folks! Right now, the only editor I know of with a keystroke save-count, infinite undo, and good crash recovery is Emacs, and it's very picky about which users it's friendly with. Firefox at least lets you undo closing a tab and saves your bookmarks and configuration automatically without asking.
No app that I know of keeps track of operations and gives you fine-grained selective undo (at, say, the word or paragraph level in a text editor).
Anyone know of a widely-available, open source, cross-platform, simple text editor that at least has auto-save, infinite undo, reliable crash recovery, and is user-friendly enough that a non-geek or a kid can use it to compose email or web pages? Even better if you can actually send email with it, but cut and paste works almost well enough. It's essential that it not be part of a dedicated email program, and it would be useful if when it's used for composing HTML it's possible to flip back and forth between a WYSIWYG and plain text view. (The way you can when composing an LJ post.)
Anyone know of such an editor that understands common version control systems like CVS and Subversion, and uses them to keep track of changes between sessions without asking?
It's not like these are new ideas...
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have had this particular problem way too many times for my own comfort.
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Besides. What is this cross-platform of which you speak? Everything worth porting to runs the GNU toolset in some form or fashion, or some ancestor or variant thereof. Things that don't run it natively need to sink or swim. Preferably sink.
And frankly, most attempts at "simple" editors annoy me. Zile is the one that carries much weight at all (Zile Is Like Emacs); nano and pico annoy me because they don't have a full enough featureset and tend to wrap lines when they shouldn't.
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The first things I install on any new Linux box are zile and (if it's not there already) ssh.
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Have you considered Google Docs? Probably not the sort of thing you were thinking of, but ...
widely-available
Anywhere there is FireFox or IE,
open source
No
simple text editor
Yes
has auto-save
Yes
infinite undo
Yes.
reliable crash recovery
Yes, autosave is to Google's servers
is user-friendly enough that a non-geek or a kid can use
Yes. Simple, generic wysiwyg word-processor style editing, producing html under the covers.
Compose email or web pages?
It makes normal html pages, private at first. Say "Share with others ..." and you can choose who can see or edit a doc. Say "Publish" and the world can see it.
when it's used for composing HTML it's possible to flip back and forth between a WYSIWYG and plain text view
Yes. (WYSIWYG is default)
You do need to have a gmail account to use it. You don't have to actually use gmail for anything, you just need an address as a log-in.
I have a bit of a love/hate reaction to Google docs. The UI and editing features are a bit limited, but server based docs that can be immediately accessed and edited from any machine anywhere, collaborative editing, and trivial publishing are all highly addictive.
Disclaimer - I work for Google.
-- Andy
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You're also very much at the mercy of the provider. I still vividly remember a coworker's anger at discovering that Yahoo had decided to get out of the calendar business without telling any of their users or giving them a chance to back up their data. Not to mention all the trouble people have had with LJ and their changing ownership and terms of service. Maybe Google's different; don't know. Don't trust them. Wouldn't advise anyone else to trust them.
There's also the matter of privacy. No thanks.
Finally, a problem I've noticed with web applications is that it's impractical to have multiple accounts. For example, I'd like to have one gmail account for work and one for home, but if I'm working from home, for example, I can't have both of them open in the same browser at the same time. Not even using X on different machines -- they coordinate using the screen to make sure there's only one instance running. Even on multiple screens, with browsers running as separate users, it's difficult. Running two instances of Firefox under two different users is the only way I've found to reliably crash MacOS X.
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The functionality is limited. The filing system doesn't scale but works well enough for a small number of docs, requires zero thinking and works for people who don't quite grok file systems and hierarchical directory structures (a large chunk of the world, it turns out.) The ability to go back arbitrarily in time makes for good disaster recovery.
You're also very much at the mercy of the provider.
I don't think Google is going to pull the plug on docs in the foreseeable future, but I would still never keep personal stuff that I actually cared about only on a third-party service.
The worst stories I have heard have been around defunct photo sites that advertised free storage forever. It's incomprehensible to me that people would upload their photos and not keep copies anywhere else.
Saving local copies of Google docs is supported. Choice of pdf, word, html, rtf, plain text or OpenOffice.
There's also the matter of privacy. No thanks.
Indeed.
it's impractical to have multiple accounts.
I decided to give this a try, not being at all sure what would it would do. Seems to work for Google Docs, but not for mail.
With two mail windows open, logging out and then into a different account from one gave access to both accounts, one in each window, for a few moments. Then the original window/account logged itself out, with an alert whining about risks from two mail users on the same computer.
Doing the same with Google Docs seems to work. I have no clue whether this is bug or a feature, or whether it will stay working.
How would you compose an email or a blog post on an airplane, to be sent later?
There's an offline version now. Quoting the description,
And that's probably the last I'll say on the topic.
-- Andy
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Maybe the software industry has long been controlled by psychic vampire telepaths who live on users' anger and frustration?
New there's a new plot twist: The open-source movement is threatening the vampires' survival by forcing them out into the open.
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