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Re: [platform-ui-dev] M2 is next week and some experiences with Android Studio


On 09/21/2015 02:20 AM, Mickael Istria wrote:
On 09/14/2015 11:39 AM, Lars Vogel wrote:
Max Rydahl Andersen <manderse@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

. I personally disliked auto-save too, but must say that now that OS X "force-feed" autosave in most of its applications I started to enjoy it. One just don't realise it >since it "just works".

I fall in the same camp. Originally, I disliked auto-save, until I
realized that I anyhow press CTRL+S all the time without thinking
about it. And I rely on CTRL+Z to undo everything, if I made an error.
What I fear the most with autosave in Eclipse is how it would interact with the debugger. I always use "Debug As..." and modify code on the running application because it reduces significantly the feedback loop over a restart, and I often hit breakpoints. Usually, I do modify code is several classes when breakpoint is hit and save only when I believe my changes are good enough to update the classes in my running application. Before I save, my code is often bad, showing red crosses and so on, I wouldn't like this code to be injected in my application under development.
With auto-save, I believe we would lost this workflow, which is IMHO the ideal workflow for a Java developer.
--
Mickael Istria
Eclipse developer at JBoss, by Red Hat
My blog - My Tweets


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These types of issues are what make AutoSave behavior so hard and why I really hate them.  The feature developers are trying to guess when I want to save something.  When I'm writing software that creates dependencies on other artifacts, I want to control when those different artifacts get saved.  The is especially true in Eclipse with Auto Build turned on.  Saving does much more than just persist the artifact in this case, it tries to reconcile the change with the rest of your project.  This could introduce myriad error messages being created for the project you are working on and become very distracting.  If you are editing an Xtext grammar file, this could lead to the complete regeneration of your language files.

Lars, you mention that you now press Ctrl-S without thinking.  I doubt that this is actually the case.  Your workflow has adapted to the knowledge that when you have completed a thought/item of work you press Ctrl-S to mark it complete or at least set a checkpoint before moving on to the next piece.  The auto save in this case is your mind performing the auto save for you.  This can't be captured in the behavior of a feature that tries to read your mind about when you have reached a checkpoint state.

AutoSave on lost focus can't account for the fact that you are switching back and forth between different classes to refer to code or check how something was performed in a different class/method.  I know that I often start composing code and leave it to refer to code else where.  I will even sometimes use the editor as a kind of scratch pad area where I use code completion to look up methods available on other classes.  This code is never intended to be saved and will often not even compile.  It is just being used to organize my thoughts.


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