Re: [ide-dev] Implicit editor saving and Auto Building in Eclipse

[Fabio Zadrozny <fabiofz@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Nov 12, 2015 at 1:17 PM, Doug Schaefer <dschaefer@xxxxxxx> wrote:

From: <ide-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx> on behalf of Eric Moffatt <emoffatt@xxxxxxxxxx>

Reply-To: Discussions about the IDE <ide-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thursday, November 12, 2015 at 8:16 AM
To: Discussions about the IDE <ide-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [ide-dev] Implicit editor saving and Auto Building in Eclipse

Konstantin, this persistent undo stack you're referring to is known as 'local history'...;-). Even better than undo you can open a compare editor to examine the file's diffs at any point.

Sorry Eric, local history isn’t an undo stack. It’s not saved after every action. And it doesn’t feed into the Undo action as a persistent undo stack would. The underlying mechanism might be useful, but the user experience isn’t very good. I wonder how many users even know Local History is a thing.

I agree with Bruno. I think Local history is a relic of the past when SCM systems were more concerned about saving your code on a server than managing history. With git and it’s index, it’s easy to manage your own local history.

But yes over to the bug :). The discussion on auto-save versus auto-build is pretty important.

​I disagree with that... local history for me is a pretty important feature regardless of SCM. I definitely don't use it all the time, but when I do use it, it's invaluable (and it's very different from the things I manage on git -- I want local history on all my saves, but I don't want to push to git as often).

Also, I'd like to give a different perspective: my main language is Python, so, building is mostly just updating my caches on PyDev and it's pretty fast, so, I want to build often. Also, I already never save any of my files as it is now, I just make it save automatically on run as I'm usually doing some test-case for the code anyways (so, I just issue a run to check the test-cases and it'll save what's needed)... or I explicitly save because I want my unit-tests to run automatically on PyDev (its PyUnit integration has such a feature). 

Anyways, auto-save is usually something I don't want the way I work anyways, now, local history on the other hand is pretty invaluable for me, because when I run something and a save happens is definitely a point on where I want to have something to revert to...

Now, I would like Eclipse to save the buffers it has in memory from time to time so that if the IDE crashes or I close the IDE and reopen it, those dirty caches would still be there (which is something Notepad++ does very nicely and IMHO gives a much better experience than auto-save -- I recommend anyone that hasn't tried it to try it: just create some untitled file or change an existing file on notepad++ and close it: on reopen it the unsaved files and dirty things are still there... much better than possibly screwing what I really have saved on disk).

Best regards,

Fabio​