Sublime’s behaviour isn’t an autosave, it just never loses text in a window. You can upgrade the entire OS, start Sublime and your windows and text will be waiting for you, regardless of saved or unsaved state. I’ve got five-year-old scratchpad windows open that I’ve never saved.
I do this with Notepad++ and honestly I have mixed feelings about it. It's so convenient but I feel weird about constantly pasting semi-important notes and snippets into this unnamed, unsaved, unsynced doc that just sits there always open on my desktop.
Basically I just feel guilty that I'm not using a "proper" note taking application when so many of them exist.
I use notepad++ in the same way without guilt, I also have a paper notebook where I write things in the same random chaos. In the past I had at a time a LG monitor that had really large bezels and I used to glue post its to it all the time as my "temporary" notes.
Most of note taking applications I tried attempt to convince all my text is important and must be stored and if possible classified and that's just not how my relationship with physical notes is.
I resonate a lot with this. Like most of what goes into that system really is pretty disposable, but it would be nice if a note-taking app could just quietly swallow anything I didn't look at for a few days, while still making it available as an "also, this?" entry in full text search. Or maybe for a kind of context-aware search/browsing, if it were possible to do a query like "show me everything I added or altered around the same time I was working with keywords x and y".
I used to use a clipboard manager. It had two functionalities:
- The ability to scroll or search my clipboard history
- The ability to pin/favorite individual entries, which would then show up in the pinned/favorited tab
That thing was practically my extra brain before the database corrupted itself... (that threw me so off that I don't even remember anymore most of the time from back when I had it.)
Fair, and I have a whole-system backup (Backblaze), but if the unsaved Notepad++ files were lost, I don't even know what it is I'd have to download from BB to recover them. Obviously I can Google that and figure it out, but who knows... maybe the BB agent will consider them a cache and exclude them? The point is that I haven't really taken the time to consider much of this because step 1 would be to literally just hit the save button, and I haven't even done that.
More broadly, though, I don't know that I consider whole-system backups as important as I might have once. All my local important docs are in Dropbox, and all the code I'm working on is regularly synced out to git hosts. Other than some unimportant Fusion/Bambu projects, most of what I'd lose is honestly that same kind of ephemeral context that unsaved Notepad++ files are: terminal history, browser bar completions, my downloads folder, etc.
That was not my experience with sublime because it'd just spontaneously lose a session along with all unsaved data. Some other people would have similar problems too (just look up 'sublime lost session', and apparently people are still having these kinds of problems with them complaining even quite recently).
I think you need to create a project file and then it stores things there.
For a long time I would get paranoid about accepting Mac updates which would require a reboot because then I'd lose my undo history and then I discovered that this is all I would need to do.
While I meant closing the whole application at once (which restores all windows/projects and unsaved changes when you restart ST), you're right that projects keep track of unsaved state on a per-project basis, too. So you can open and close project windows individually, but also do the same for Sublime Text as a whole.
If you have multiple windows open and close them in the wrong order, you lose everything but the last one. Learned that the hard way and now never have more than one open.
Zed has an "autosave" setting, it's just off by default.