Auto Save

[David A. Moon <Moon at SCRC-TENEX>]

    Date: Mon 9 Jan 84 15:02-EST
    From: David M. J. Saslav <SAZ@MIT-OZ>

    Wouldn't Auto Save Mode be a nice thing to incorporate
    into ZMACS?  A couple of us were griping about losing
    files due to system crashes, and I got "volunteered" to
    mail the request to see if anything could be done.

Auto Save mode in Emacs forces you to wait while the file is written out.
You don't notice this too much since you aren't writing over the network
and so the operation is reasonably fast, and also in a timesharing system
you tend to get used to occasionally pauses where the machine stops responding
for no obvious reason.

If the Lisp machine had an Auto Save mode that worked this way, which would
be easy enough to do, I'm not so sure you would like it.  It could perhaps do
saving "in the background", but that would be more difficult and also presents
the possibility of getting an inconsistent snapshot of the file if you are
editing while it's saving.

Most people around here just type m-X Save every half hour or so, or whenever
they come to a logical point to save, where they feel they have finished a major
conceptual task that they wouldn't like to do over again, and the state of the
files is reasonably consistent.