John Gruber, over at Daring Fireball has a post, Untitled Document Syndrome, that makes two points of interest to Irreal readers. The first involves the difficulty of initially saving what he calls “untitled documents”. He’s writing about macOS, of course, but even through I’ve used one Mac or another for almost two decades, I had a hard time figuring out what he was talking about. I guess it’s this: in some Apple text apps you can start typing without specifying a document name or a file path for where it should be saved. That means that when you first save the file you have to negotiate the file save dialog to supply this information.
Since I write everything in Emacs, this never happens to me. Part of starting a new file is executing a find-file which specifies its name and file system location. Even then, I just specify it in the minibuffer; there’s no annoying open dialog to deal with. The first time I save it is like any other time1: a simple Ctrl+x Ctrl+s.
The point of all this is that the difficulty of the initial save means that people will put it off and therefore suffer disaster when the app or system crashes. They may even lose hours of work. Happily, that first save is easy in Emacs so there’s no reason—not even a weak one like the save dialog—for putting it off.
Even if you do put it off, Emacs, like Gruber’s editor BBEdit, has you covered. It does periodic automatic backups so you never lose more than a little work.
The second point is related and concerns note taking apps. Like most of us—at least us oldtimers—Gruber stated taking notes by creating a file for each one with his editor. As we’ve all discovered, that doesn’t work all that well so he moved to Yojimbo and discovered that he was taking many more notes. As you all know, I solved the same problem with Journelly. I use it as my memo book and typically make about 10 entries per day. People think of Journelly as integrated with Emacs but it can also save its data in Markdown so it’s perfectly usable on any system and editor as long as you’re using an iPhone.
It’s amusing how 40 year old technology is still more convenient and easier to use than “modern” systems with dialog boxes for everything.
Footnotes:
Yes, one can just open a buffer, set the appropriate mode and start writing. When it comes time to save it, you do have specify a name and location but, of course, no one works this way.