TW5 request: autosave every N minutes

[Chuck R.]

My setup: TW5.1.19 on tiddlyspot.com using Firefox v71

Just a handy idea I had for the future of TW5.

I see that TW has an autosave function and it autosaves every time you finish editing a tiddler. But as my TW gets bigger it takes longer and longer to save the file to a website (tiddlyspot.com), so I don't want to save every time I close a tiddler, I want to save every  N minutes, where the user enters N. A value of 0 would be "no autosave every N minutes". Or they could enter minutes from 1-999. The save settings are "choose one" like a radio button and could become:

o No autosave

o Autosave on saving tiddler

o Autosave every __ minutes

This would require TW5 to do some time calculations to see how much time has passed, as well as accounting for the "midnight problem" where I last save a tiddler on 2019-12-19 11:59pm and then if it's set to save every 10 minutes, it would save (only if changes were made) at 2019-12-20 12:09am.

Thanks for considering this!

[Eric Shulman]

On Friday, December 20, 2019 at 7:04:24 AM UTC-8, Chuck R. wrote:

My setup: TW5.1.19 on tiddlyspot.com using Firefox v71

I recommend upgrading your document to 5.1.21 (the current release) or even 5.1.22pre-release (the latest development build) 

* The "midnight" problem shouldn't be difficult.  Internally (in Javascript), time values can be represented as "absolute values", expressed as milliseconds since a system-wide base date/time.  This eliminates all consideration of date boundaries, but *might* still be relative to your current time zone, though it might also be expressed as UTC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time).

* If you are currently editing a tiddler when the timer-based autosave is triggered, what do you want it to do?  The easiest solution is to save BOTH the "Draft of..." tiddler AND the underlying 'saved' tiddler, so that both of them will be stored.  However, I'm not sure if this would *always* be the desired action, so perhaps a checkbox option (e.g., [x] autosave draft tiddlers) would be useful.

* Sometimes, when I am working on complex changes, I don't want to save anything until I am completely satisfied that I haven't broken something.  There should be an easy-to-access button (e.g., a sidebar PageControls button) to quickly disable/enable the current autosave setting.

* If you are using the default "download saver", then saving the file usually triggers an interactive system-provided dialog (i.e., "Save as...").  This would interrupt the current activity of the user every N minutes.  This shouldn't be a problem unless you set the autosave interval to be inconveniently short (like once a minute!)

* Should there be a minimum allowable interval (e.g., not less than 5 minutes) for timed autosaves?  Should this minimum be based on which saver you are currently configured to use?  For example, if I am working on a locally stored (file://) document, I might want to save every minute, but if I am working online (e.g., http:// to TiddlySpot) I might want to limit automatic uploads to every 30 minutes to prevent excessive overhead, especially if I am on a slow connection or working with a large file.

Your thoughts?

-e

Thanks for considering this!

[TonyM]

I Actualy find auto or manual save sufficient on stable environments but would appreciate a save after an idle period. A count Down to autosave would be nice.

One advantage of a timed autosave if you are editing text in a particular way without the draft mechanisium it can save the last bytes entered.

On the OT, there is a plugin that enables timed triggers, sorry no reference to give you.

I would be keen to have a timed save "has changed" to a separate file than the loaded file, and a method to recover changes lost.

Tony

[Mark S.]

https://ooktech.com/TiddlyWiki/TimerActions/#%24%3A%2Fplugins%2FOokTech%2FTimerActions