Re: [Usability] How should an editor behave when it comes to search and replace?

[Jamie McCracken <jamiemcc blueyonder co uk>]

On Tue, 2005-01-04 at 22:32 +0000, Alan Horkan wrote:
> On Tue, 4 Jan 2005, Markus Bertheau wrote:
> 
> > Date: Tue, 04 Jan 2005 23:25:01 +0100
> > From: Markus Bertheau <twanger bluetwanger de>
> > To: Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>
> > Cc: usability gnome org
> > Subject: Re: [Usability] How should an editor behave when it comes to
> >     search and replace?
> >
> > У Втр, 2005-01-04 у 21:51 +0000, Alan Horkan пише:
> >
> > > It is an interesting idea and although people keep suggesting it I'll feel
> > > much better when there are a few more implmentations out there,
> > > particularly when someone tries it with a much more complicated
> > > application than a text editor.
> >
> > Why? If I want to know if continuous save works with a text editor, why
> > not write such a text editor?
> 
> Sorry if I wasn't clear.
> 
> Writing any application with 'continuous save' is an interesting idea.
> I'd be interestd to know what metric are you used to determine how often
> to save, how do balance the need for reliability against responsiveness?
> If i pull the plug out what is the most I data i might lose, a few
> characters, a line of text?

continous save to me implies saving whenever anything changes (ie on
keypress in a text editor). Of course with lazy writes on most systems
the actual point of saving would be non-deterministic. Continuous save
on systems without lazy writes and slow hard drives should obviously be
avoided (as should notebook users who dont wanna waste battery power
writing to disk too frequently with this setting).

> 
> Writing a text editor is a good start and I look forward to someone trying
> out the idea with more complicated applications, as some compound
> documents dont lend themselves to incremental saves and it will be harder
> to get everything rigth but still remain responsive.

I would say its a lot more inefficient to do this for richer forms of
data (imagine gimp with 50MB image having continous save - Ouch!). Text
is very easy (and efficient) to append to a file and that would most
likely happen most of the time in a text editor.

jamie.

> 
> - Alan H.
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