[Geany-Users] Geany for novel writers

[Little Girl]

Hey there,

Peter Popov wrote:

> Little Girl:
> > Yes, you would have to edit each file each time. You wouldn't
> > have to save the changes, though.
 
> I autosave every 20 seconds. Even do some backups.

Ah, then you'd have to get around that by copying it to another file,
letting that one save, and leave the unchanged original intact.

By the way, auto-save is dangerous unless you keep incremental
copies of each one. If you mess up and it overwrites the only copy
and you don't have the previous version(s) to shop through for the
pre-messed up state, you're in a bad way.

I don't know if you've ever done NaNoWriMo, but I did my most
glorious writing one day in a stretch of about one to two hours. The
program I was using to write in auto-saved on change (it makes me
feel anxious just to think back on it). I accidentally deleted all
the text. It auto-saved. There was no way to retrieve the data. I
rewrote what I could remember of it, but I could feel that it wasn't
as good the second time around. That's haunted me ever since, and I
make sure and turn off auto-save in all programs immediately before
ever using them.

If I wanted auto-save (which would be a really good idea for times,
like the one above, where you're just plain in the zone and you bang
out some amazing text), I'd write a script to capture each auto-save
the instant the program spits it out and rename it with the date and
time (to the second) and do manual clean-up afterwards.

You probably know all of that already and have a safety valve already
all set up, but your auto-save mention brought back that memory, so I
figured I'd share.

-- 
Little Girl

There is no spoon.