Summary: I think it would be a worthwhile feature to automatically autosave new documents in a preferences directory under the user-home prior to the first, intentional save by the user.

Details: 

When a new document is created, it is a assigned an initial, non-functional filename, such as "Untitled Document 1". Anyone who uses a notepad application will inevitably use "gedit" for short-term note-taking or TODO lists -in addition- to more intentional, significant tasks (such as development and other extended, written documents). 

The difference between these two cases is that the former doesn't require the files to be named, whereas, in the latter, named files are usually necessary. 

Even if the short-term, unsaved documents run the risk of being lost, often it might not be desired to save them, as, ideally, their utility will no longer be necessary in a couple of days, and you wish to not clutter your system with tiny, stale documents.

I am proposing a modification to "gedit" that will automatically saved documents to a user-specific directly until they are deliberately saved somewhere else. For example, when an unsaved document is named "Untitled Document 13", the user will know that it will automatically be stored to "~/.gedit/untitled/Untitled Document 13". This obviously requires that untitled documents opened in one session must have a continuous series of numbering into the next so there won't be any naming conflicts. Cleanup strategies of old files are a trivial concern and are left to another discussion.

Though I am unfamiliar with the gedit codebase (I downloaded a copy and got it building, but only did a cursory look through gedit-document-saver.c), it seems like this wouldn't be a tough feature to implement. It might be little more than a couple of changes to how the current save-state of all current documents is assessed (I'm assuming that if a document is currently "unsaved", it is skipped during save checks).

I love gedit. I think this is one of the very few improvements that could be made, and it'd be a rare feature among the editors of the world.

I'd be happy to add the feature myself, but I'd like some feedback and/or direction from the current maintainers.


Dustin