Feature Request: Store Unsaved Document tabs in the user's temp files despite being unsaved for disaster recovery.

[ipaqmaster]

 * Xed version (xed --version)

xed - Version 3.4.3


 * Distribution - (Mint 17.2, Arch, Fedora 25, etc...)

Archlinux

Issue

Unsaved documents cannot survive a disaster recovery scenario, such as a simulated one with #pkill -f -9 xed or my issue posted earlier this year #591

Steps to reproduce

Open a large enough binary/text file or simulate unexpected Xed death with #pkill -f -9 xed

Desired behaviour

Check a temp or cache dir for a backup copy of older data on next startup.

Perhaps something similar to how Vim handles cache files including for unsaved/unfinished file-editing sessions under ~/.cache/vim/swap/ - able to recover even from a kill -9 thanks to its swp files.

Other information

NA

[maciekberry]

Hello,
I do not know how big is this demand (no idea about the architecture of xed), however, as far as I can tell, no current linux text editor has this feature and it would be a killer one!
(ps. TextMate from the MacOS world has it).

This feature opens an entirely new set of use cases for the editor: you can use it to write down quick notes and never worry about saving. And of course it is then very disaster-safe.

My C is very very bad so I can only give a thumbs up to this demand....

[Enjymon]

A quick question to the developers of Xed (or someone versed with the structure or source code of the program) in relation to this feature request:
Under which format is the text content of Unsaved documents stored and would appear in the process's memory? As plain text, in a temporary buffer-file or variable?

I'm asking because my Xed session froze with several Unsaved documents. Which ironically happened just when doing 'File'->'Save as...'.

I've managed to make a byte-per-byte copy of all the readable regions of the process's memory (from /proc/$pid/mem and as listed in /proc/$pid/maps) in which I can see chunks of text spread among non-text binary data.

Before pursuing further, I would like to know if the texts of the Unsaved documents can be found among those chunks of text, or if they are hopelessly buried among the non-text, binary bytes of the recovered process's memory.

I would not know in which source file(s) of which subdirectory of the project I could search for this information.

[zpangwin]

Not sure if this helpful but I recently discovered that the editor mousepad (xfce equivalent of xed) implements this feature (I'm on mousepad 0.6.5 and xed 3.8.2 on Fedora 42 if it matters). I realize that the two do not share the same codebase (e.g. Xed is a fork of Pluma while Mousepad was originally a fork of Leafpad but was later rewritten) but both are fully open-source GTK-based editors with the same license which is more than we can say for a lot of options out there (e.g. sublime is not open source, notepad++ ports usually go with Qt, etc).

At a quick glance, it looks like both are mostly written in C. While I very much doubt that we could get away with something as easy as a drop-in copy/paste/merge solution that "Just Works" on the first try, I think it's possible there's maybe some level of code-reuse rather than writing the feature completely from scratch.

I would like this feature and am not opposed to taking a look and seeing if I can hack something together. That said, I'm not sure how much time I have to work on it and my C Programming is a bit on the weak side to put it nicely. So even if I manage to get something that "Works on my Machine™", might take additional time to make it PR-worthy. In other words, if anybody else looks at this comment and feels like they have the time and interest, then don't wait on me (if I do have any updates - I will post back)

IMO, both are good editors but there are several feature differences between Mousepad and Xed. Though, as far as I can tell they use the same regex engine (did a fairly thorough testing of supported regex features across 20 or so Linux graphical editors awhile back and these had exactly the same supported features and syntax across the board). Xed has a Sort lines option, MP does not. I like Xed's replace bars better than Mousepad's replace dialog. But definitely would be cool to see both projects improve from each other.

repos

official repo: https://gitlab.xfce.org/apps/mousepad
unofficial github mirror: https://github.com/xfce-mirror/mousepad

Quick high level overview of how autosaves work in Mousepad:

First, Mousepad does not enable this feature by default. I had to open it and go to Edit > Preferences > File tab > under the "History" section there is a setting labeled "session restore" and an associated drop-down where you must pick one of the following:

• never
• after a crash
• unsaved documents
• saved documents
• always

In my case, I selected always. This causes any unsaved tabs to be saved to temporary files under ~/.local/share/Mousepad as autosave-1, autosave-2, etc and restore upon launch. In the editor, they still appear as Untitled 1, Untitled 2 etc. But if I get a power outage, unrecoverable system freeze, or simply forget to save before I reboot, then I don't really have to worry - which is damn handy.

relevant technical details

from a quick grep of the MP code base, it seems like the stuff related to autosave is mostly in these files:

• ./mousepad/mousepad-history.h
• ./mousepad/mousepad-history.c
• ./mousepad/mousepad-file.h
• ./mousepad/mousepad-file.c

[Partho-Mal]

I’ve been hitting this same problem on Linux Mint 22 (Xed 3.8.2) and I think a lightweight draft recovery system could solve it.
My idea: periodically write unsaved buffers to a compressed draft file in ~/.cache/xed/drafts/ (only when modified), store minimal metadata, and restore them automatically on startup. This would keep disk usage small while still surviving kill -9 or crash scenarios.

[slaygon]

I have a working version of this that I am running locally. Got tired of losing my notes, so it is what I run by default on my Mint. If you want to build it for yourself, you can find it at autosave-session-restore.