It isn't rocket science any more...

[mdlbear]

...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...

Comments

[mdlbear]

Best explanation I've heard in years.