From: Ken M. <ke...@be...> - 2001-02-26 22:42:40
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I think this would be a wonderful idea. I don't use version control for many of my own projects--it just doesn't seem worth the trouble, under windows, of setting up the system for projects that are only being worked on by one person (me). A "lite" version control would be great, not just for programming, but for docs in general. Note that it should be relatively easy to implement this in a way that is completely transparent to those who don't care about it, like so: 1) In "normal" mode, "Save" is (effectively) "snapshot". 2) In the rare circumstance that a person quits without saving an unmodified buffer, the last snapshot comes up automatically, but the "unsaved" modifications can be retrieved if desired. This makes a "save/snapshot" behave just like the current "save". 3) An option exists to change over to "CVS mode", where saves truly are automatic and a snapshot simply _names_ a particular save. Only the names of the operations, not their actual semantics, would change. 4) An option exists to control how many past snapshots are recoverable; snapshot info older than this will be autodeleted to save disk space. In "normal save" mode, this number can by default be small so people not aware of this feature won't use much disk space. I happen to think that this type of data persistency is great; rather than requiring a user to explicitly manage "versions" of a document, all programs, when possible, should simply save _everything_ the user does, with the option of reverting to an earlier version if the user does something they later decide was undesirable. This is much simpler, conceptually, than the way its usually done now. Jef Raskin, in "The Humane Interface", has some interesting points about data persistency. IMHO one of the best books that's been written about user interface design. Cheers, Ken > Message: 9 > From: Kristian Ovaska <kri...@he...> > To: jed...@li... > Date: Mon, 26 Feb 2001 21:28:29 +0200 > Subject: [ jEdit-users ] Internal version control system & getting rid of Save > Reply-To: jed...@li... > > I'm taking a course on GUIs at my university, and I got an interesting > idea that gets rid of the "Save" feature completely by saving the file > automatically when needed. To make this work properly, the editor > needs an internal version control system, much like CVS but simpler, > that lets the user go back to any earlier version of the file. From > the users' point of view, the file on hard disk and the editable copy > in memory are always synchronized, so he doesn't need to think about > saving at all. Also, he gets the benefits of version control. > > A local GUI design/research group is doing research on how to do this > in MS Word. The research is still unpublished (and unfinished, I > think), but the lecturer, who is part of the research group, told the > main idea. I began to wonder if this could be usable in jEdit. > > Here's how it works: jEdit periodically checks if the file has been > modified since last auto-save. If so, it generates a diff between the > versions and saves it in a file that contains the version history of > the edited file. This is much like CVS. The edited file itself is also > saved, in a normal (plain) format that makes exporting easy. The whole > thing is transparent to the user. > |