To Undo or not to Undo..

Feature requests, and in-depth discussions of features and the way Mellel works

Moderators: Eyal Redler, redlers, Ori Redler

An Undo buffer that doesn't get cleared by save or auto-save...

...is an absolute must for me.
54
86%
...would interfere with my workflow.
4
6%
...is a matter of indifference to me.
5
8%
 
Total votes: 63

hlb
Got the styles thing figured out
Posts: 12
Joined: Mon Oct 09, 2006 1:00 am

To Undo or not to Undo..

Post by hlb »

I'm a little perplexed by the nature of the Undo function in Mellel. What exactly does it undo, and what does it not undo? I rely heavily on the ability to fiddle with a sentence and then to have the option to restore it to its original state if things don't work out. In these cases I have found Mellel's Undo command entirely non-responsive, and had to reconstruct the sentence (or paragraph!) from memory... am I missing something—or is Mellel?

I really hope this will be fixed... a frequently failing Undo command is a deal-breaker for me.
Last edited by hlb on Mon Oct 09, 2006 4:45 pm, edited 1 time in total.
macsailor
Knows everything, can prove it
Posts: 367
Joined: Thu Oct 20, 2005 1:10 pm
Location: Linköping, Sweden

Post by macsailor »

I agree on this one. It's quite annoying to not be able to use the Undo feature as I'm use to while using other word processors (i.e. NWE).
Peter Edwardsson
..............................
Truth is not always popular, but it is always right.
zoul
Knows everything, can prove it
Posts: 120
Joined: Thu Aug 10, 2006 1:48 pm
Location: Boskovice, Czech Republic
Contact:

Re: To Undo or not to Undo..

Post by zoul »

hlb wrote:What exactly does it undo, and what does it not undo?
It undoes anything, but the undo buffer gets cleared when you save the file. Is this the problem? I must say I have problems with this, too, because I am used to frequent saving to the point it has become a habit – I often hit Cmd-S only to realize the new sentence is no good and there is none but manual way to fix it. I suggest that you add a poll to your post, requesting an “undo-over-save” feature.
nicka
Knows everything, can prove it
Posts: 677
Joined: Thu Oct 20, 2005 2:55 pm
Location: Oslo
Contact:

Post by nicka »

Worse still, the undo history is lost when Mellel auto-saves. I think this is bad enough to be called a bug (although I guess it's not one in the technical sense that this is how the program is meant to work).
hlb
Got the styles thing figured out
Posts: 12
Joined: Mon Oct 09, 2006 1:00 am

Post by hlb »

I see now... indeed, neither disabling auto-save nor refraining from my obsessively frequent manual saves would be a satisfactory solution—but a save feature that leaves the Undo buffer intact would be.

Note that I added a poll to the original post as suggested.
nicka
Knows everything, can prove it
Posts: 677
Joined: Thu Oct 20, 2005 2:55 pm
Location: Oslo
Contact:

Post by nicka »

Until this is fixed, you might consider turning off Auto-save, saving manually only infrequently, and setting the Automatic Backup preference so that backups get created every few minutes.
hlb
Got the styles thing figured out
Posts: 12
Joined: Mon Oct 09, 2006 1:00 am

Post by hlb »

nicka wrote:Until this is fixed, you might consider turning off Auto-save, saving manually only infrequently, and setting the Automatic Backup preference so that backups get created every few minutes.
Right. That's a tough one for me... I didn't realize how often, and how mechanically, I hit Cmd-S after every bit I type...

Anyway, so am I to understand that "Automatic Backup," unlike Auto-Save, does not overwrite the Undo buffer?
mardav
New to all this
Posts: 1
Joined: Sun Apr 30, 2006 3:09 am

Post by mardav »

I also save frequently, which makes undoing actions a problem. In the past, I have used several word processing programs which offered a menu of recent actions and you could skip over several (like new typing, a deletion, more typing) to undo an earlier step (such as a move). It could be hard to determine exactly which step to undo, but the feature was useful.

Another option I miss from other programs is the ability to append selected text to a file on disk. Before I would make extensive edits/deletions to a paragraph or section, I would use a macro to append it to a special file on disk. If I wanted to recover the original text, I could go back to it at any time, even after my current session had ended.

I can do something similar now by keeping a special file open and copying text to it by using a macro. Unfortunately, that requires having the append and editing files in the same window locations all the time; otherwise, the macro can't move back and forth between the two documents properly.

Margaret
hlb
Got the styles thing figured out
Posts: 12
Joined: Mon Oct 09, 2006 1:00 am

Post by hlb »

Ok, to those who answered the poll with "would interfere with my workflow," in what way would a persistent Undo buffer do that?
ozean
Knows everything, can prove it
Posts: 322
Joined: Thu Oct 20, 2005 12:28 pm
Location: Norway
Contact:

Post by ozean »

I also use the auto-backup work-around to be able to have a long-range undo function. In my view the deletion of the undo list during a save is close to a bug too (especially when it happens during an auto-save and as such is not transparent to the user). It took me quite a while until I figured this out and then I immediately turned auto-save off...
kjmatthews
Knows everything, can prove it
Posts: 113
Joined: Wed Jan 17, 2007 2:17 am

Post by kjmatthews »

The clearing of the undo buffer on save has been a serious hurdle to switching over to Mellel from any of the many (worse) alternatives. It is entirely contrary to user expectation, and quite unintuitive. It is what keeps me going back to NeoOffice.
ecbrown
Got the styles thing figured out
Posts: 14
Joined: Tue Aug 22, 2006 4:07 am

Post by ecbrown »

What is the origin of the "hit apple-s" every ten seconds mentality? I think that it is because operating systems and word processing applications used to be so buggy that you could lose that awesome paragraph unless you did.

Truth be told--I have NEVER had Mellel crash on me. Not once. And my OS has crashed only once in the past two years.

Maybe we should look at it a different way. If I hit Open Apple S, then that means Save to Disk as if it were there to stay, never to be undone again. Then clearing the Undo Buffer frees up memory so that other tasks can use it.
macsailor
Knows everything, can prove it
Posts: 367
Joined: Thu Oct 20, 2005 1:10 pm
Location: Linköping, Sweden

Post by macsailor »

ecbrown wrote:Maybe we should look at it a different way. If I hit Open Apple S, then that means Save to Disk as if it were there to stay, never to be undone again. Then clearing the Undo Buffer frees up memory so that other tasks can use it.
I prefer features like Unlimited Undos as in NWE. I do not want to choose between automaticly saving my documents every 2 or 5 minutes and then losing the ability to use the undo feature or be afraid of losing some of my text just to be sure to be able to undo the recent typing.

I believe that most of the users of MacOSX has enough memory in their computers to allow both the automatic saving of the document AND the ability of "unlimited undos".
Peter Edwardsson
..............................
Truth is not always popular, but it is always right.
nicka
Knows everything, can prove it
Posts: 677
Joined: Thu Oct 20, 2005 2:55 pm
Location: Oslo
Contact:

Post by nicka »

If there were a problem with memory or disk space for undo history then it could be dealt with the way iMovie does it, by having a function, chosen by the user, to clear the undo history (the trash in iMovie).
But I don't believe that there is a problem with disk space. Mellel deals with styled text, not video files.
Either way it is unecessary for Mellel to engage in the bad behaviour of silently removing the ladder you climbed up on.
kjmatthews
Knows everything, can prove it
Posts: 113
Joined: Wed Jan 17, 2007 2:17 am

Post by kjmatthews »

ecbrown wrote:What is the origin of the "hit apple-s" every ten seconds mentality?
I lived in an apartment for a year where the power went out unexpectedly at least once a month. I had a desktop computer. Lost many a research paper that way.

I more recently (while writing final papers last semester) lived with a new laptop with bad pre-installed memory for about a month before I was able to leave it at the Apple Store for them to diagnose and correct the problem. I had six kernel panics in one two-day period, but didn't lose any work thanks to reflexive cmd-S-ing every time I paused to think.

I don't think it is useful to ask where the obsessive saving mentality comes from. The job of a software developer is not to question or correct the psychology of his users, but to understand and work with that psychology. If a reflex or expectation exists, it probably exists for a reason. So the more useful question is what relationship users expect to exist between undo buffers and saving, in order to try not to subvert it. I think most users would agree that there is no implicit or intuitive connection between the two things, if only because that expectation is conditioned by every single other popular word-processing program on the market. Whether it makes logical sense or not, Mellel subverts common, conditioned user expectation, and that constitutes a misbehavior, even if it's called a feature.
Post Reply