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

[andyheninger.livejournal.com]

I wasn't actually thinking of you using it, but that it might be possibility for Colleen. Even leaving aside the server based app issues, I suspect the other limitations of Google Docs would drive you crazy and do bad things to your blood pressure. I use it mainly when I want collaboration or very quick sharing.

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,

Google Docs uses Google Gears, an open source browser extension that enables web applications to run offline. When you aren't connected to the Internet, Google Docs uses information stored on your computer's hard drive rather than relying on information sent across the network. When you're offline, your edits are stored on your own computer until you re-connect, at which point your changes are synced with Google Docs' servers and made available to collaborators.

And that's probably the last I'll say on the topic.

-- Andy

[mdlbear]

Pretty cool, actually... I may point Colleen in that direction for some things. After getting her a gmail account, of course.