Suffer from Ctrl+S fatigue? We have a feature for you

The idea of the “Integrated Development Experience” is a tool that brings all the systems a developer needs to develop their application into a single place. Coding, debugging, publishing, profiling… these are all tools that Visual Studio brings to our developers. Just as a general contractor doesn’t solve every problem with a hammer, however, we’re aware that Visual Studio isn’t the only tool in the developer toolkit.

One pain point we’ve been hearing about more and more is one that comes up when switching from one tool to another. Specifically, when you arrive at your other tool if you’ve been using Visual Studio without saving your code, that code shown in your other tool may be out of date. Then, when you edit the code in the other tool, your code is out of sync and it’s an ordeal trying to put everything back together.

Starting with 17.2 Preview 1, the new autosave feature will help with this. Use Visual Studio Search (Ctrl+Q) and look for “autosave”. That will take you to the Environment\Documents page in Tools\Options.

$A screen capture of the Visual Studio Options dialog. It has the Environment\Documents page selected and highlights the "Automatically save files when Visual Studio is in the background" option with a red rectangle. The option is checked.$

If “Automatically save files when Visual Studio is in the background” is checked, any time Visual Studio loses focus, usually as you change to another application in Windows, VS will attempt to save every dirty document in the IDE. This will include project files, solution files and even miscellaneous files that aren’t part of the project or solution. If saving a file fails for any reason (for instance, the file is read-only on disc), Visual Studio will keep your changes in the editor and simply leave the file dirty. The intent is that when you switch to another tool, after a moment, all your changes in VS will be committed to disk. While most developers will benefit from this, code files on slower disks or on remote servers will make a lot more save operations, and developers should keep that fact in mind when enabling autosave.

It’s worth mentioning that folks who are taking advantage of the “Code Cleanup on Save” feature from 17.1 will find that autosave does not trigger a Code Cleanup. We felt that it would be somewhat disruptive if it happened too often. Code Cleanup on Save will only trigger when you explicitly save the file, either through a command like Ctrl+S or implicitly as part of a build.

What do you think?

We’ve had suggestions in the past that some developers would like an even more aggressive autosave mechanism. Some developers would like Visual Studio to commit their changes to disk when Visual Studio goes idle after a set amount of time has passed. Another suggestion is to save when switching documents. If you’re the kind of developer who would find that useful, we’d love to hear from you. You can join the conversation here.

Please let us know how this feature works for you. Are you using it? Is it being too aggressive or not aggressive enough? How could we improve it? Please let us know your thoughts. We read all the suggestions provided on Developer Community as well as the comments on this blog post.

Download Visual Studio 2022 Preview

Author

Dante Gagne

Senior Product Manager

Joined Microsoft in 2002 as a tester on the "Sparkle" project which eventually became Expression Blend. Dante moved from test to program management in 2009 and since then has worked in Windows tooling and more recently the Visual Studio editor. He also accepted a position as the accessibility driver for all developer tools in 2017 and happily spends his time trying to make sure that developers of all abilities can be effective with the Visual Studio family of tools. With a heart that loves games and puzzles, Dante brings his passion to the editor while also championing Accessibility throughout developer tools.

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Peter D March 31, 2022

A good2have feature if that’s your style. My style, however, is smashing that Ctrl+S like it owes me money, whether I’m in Word, Notepad or VS/VS Code or Photoshop, and I’m ok staying with that 🙂

Kent Boogaart March 29, 2022

Am keen to try for a hot reload scenario (external tooling). One thing I've noticed is that it doesn't behave the same as Ctrl+Shift+S in that extensions don't execute. I have the Whitespace Visualizer extension installed, which strips unnecessary whitespace when saving. It works fine with Ctrl+Shift+S, but not with this feature.

Also, I'm very doubtful that I will want this feature on for all solutions in the long term as it will probably cause me...

Dante Gagne Author March 31, 2022 0

Thanks for the feedback. Would you mind suggesting that here? I'd love to capture this suggestion.

The way Autosave is designed is that extensions need to opt into saves invoked via autosave. We were actively concerned that if extensions were being too aggressive here, it might result in some very uncomfortable situations, particularly if we extend autosave to act on a timer or on idle. Right now, we're finalizing a few pieces of this story, so...
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Thanks for the feedback. Would you mind suggesting that here? I’d love to capture this suggestion.

The way Autosave is designed is that extensions need to opt into saves invoked via autosave. We were actively concerned that if extensions were being too aggressive here, it might result in some very uncomfortable situations, particularly if we extend autosave to act on a timer or on idle. Right now, we’re finalizing a few pieces of this story, so I don’t believe we’ve got the documentation available for extension authors to connect to the Autosave, but we should be providing that soon.

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Kenneth Reid March 28, 2022

I downloaded Visual Studio 2022 about 2 months ago, and have been writing code since downloading the software. I have noticed something that rather bothers me somewhat. In previous versions of Visual Studio, when I successfully compiled a project, it automatically generated an application (.exe) file. In Visual Studio 2022, I have noticed that the application (.exe) file is no longer being generated. Am I missing something in the software setup or something? Is there...

Ted Senft March 23, 2022

Adding a controversial feature like autosave, but then you see there are critical issues like https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/t/1593340 causing people to be unable to use 2022 at all, that haven’t had an update in 4 months.

Priorities?

Ian Marteens March 24, 2022 0

Priorities? They have it. Probably, inverted.

Thierry Pélissier March 23, 2022

Bonjour,
Je viens de faire la mise à jour et je suis toujours en 17.1.2. Je n’ai pas l’option.

Dante Gagne Author March 24, 2022 0

The feature is available in 17.2 preview 1 (17.2.1). It looks like you’re on 17.1.2, so you’ll need to update to the newest preview.

Michael Taylor March 23, 2022

I'm with many others here in that I won't be using this feature as it causes more problems to me than it solves. Even when using source control I often make changes to files that I may or may not want to keep and it would be bad if I suddenly got a chat or voice call from my boss, or perhaps an Outlook notification about an upcoming meeting in the middle of my VS...

DANIEL WILIANTO April 12, 2022 · Edited 0

Yup.. Most of the time, even with git or version control, closing and reopening the file is much faster, when I think I messed during the last five minutes. Auto saving (into the real file) is an inconvenience, not a convenience. I am glad to hear that it's opt in feature, not the default feature, as in other IDEs. As for the fear of crashing / BSOD, the way Microsoft Word and Excel handled it...
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Yup.. Most of the time, even with git or version control, closing and reopening the file is much faster, when I think I messed during the last five minutes. Auto saving (into the real file) is an inconvenience, not a convenience. I am glad to hear that it’s opt in feature, not the default feature, as in other IDEs. As for the fear of crashing / BSOD, the way Microsoft Word and Excel handled it is correct already.

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Ben Medina March 23, 2022 0

> The only real use case I can see is if somebody types in some code and then switches to the command line to do something
One example is committing to a VCS from the command line. I have more than once forgotten to save my last change before switching to the command line to commit. This saves me the hassle of fixing that after the fact.
- Dante Gagne Author March 24, 2022 0
  
  One of the other use cases we've heard from folks is when they prefer VS Code for editing some file types and VS for others. VS Code already has an autosave feature, so folks will edit over there for some file types, then jump to VS. VS Code would autosave as soon as you switch to VS. But trying to go the other way didn't work.
  
  The VCS solution is absolutely another one, and there...
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  One of the other use cases we’ve heard from folks is when they prefer VS Code for editing some file types and VS for others. VS Code already has an autosave feature, so folks will edit over there for some file types, then jump to VS. VS Code would autosave as soon as you switch to VS. But trying to go the other way didn’t work.
  
  The VCS solution is absolutely another one, and there are many folks who use external tools alongside VS. The goal is to try, where we can, to streamline that process as best we can.
  
  When we asked the VS Code folks how many people used Autosave, the numbers on aggregate were higher than I predicted. If that many people wanted the feature, it was worth investigating on our side.
  
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Tim Wallace March 23, 2022

Off-topic: When did “Integrated Development Environment” get rechristened to “* Experience”?

Dante Gagne Author March 24, 2022 0

Hmmm… apparently it get rechristened to a typo. I’m somewhat amused that I didn’t catch that. Yes, it should be an integrated development environment. No idea where Experience came from.
Ian Marteens March 23, 2022 0

Probably, when woke millenials took over MS. In any case, VS is suffering what I call “dead by features”. In a year, they won’t remember all these shenanigans they are happily adding now.

Daniel Neely March 22, 2022

Enabling this would only change where I end up being gotcha-ed; but without the easy ability to get back to the prior state. On the plus side I wouldn't end up forgetting to include some last minute comments/whitespace cleanup when committing code via my external git client. On the down side, there are also cases where I find myself deciding that whatever code I spent the last 10 minutes typing is experimental/risky enough,...

Jason Baginski March 22, 2022 0

This is a great feature for those that need it. It's also amazing to know that the VS Team recognizes that not everyone operates the same way and features like this should be optional, not forced.

I think the whole "create a ~$ prepended file that has constantly saved 'dirty data' that if something happens and the file is reloaded without a proper save/discard asks if you want to resume from your...
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This is a great feature for those that need it. It’s also amazing to know that the VS Team recognizes that not everyone operates the same way and features like this should be optional, not forced.

I think the whole “create a ~$ prepended file that has constantly saved ‘dirty data’ that if something happens and the file is reloaded without a proper save/discard asks if you want to resume from your dirty data” like what Office does would be another route to take. That would allow for another set of users to get covered in case Windows decides to restart or there’s a crash of any sort.

Honestly, I have more ctrl+z than ctrl+s fatigue. The whole “select some text, ctrl+h to find and replace, realize that it switched from ‘selection’ to ‘document’ for no apparently reason” thing has bitten me more than once over the last few months. Sometimes I don’t notice till I’ve done several other things, then clicking x and -not- saving is my safest path.

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- Denizhan Yigitbas March 22, 2022 0
  
  Hi Jason! I’m Denizhan, PM on Visual Studio responsible for search and navigation.
  
  I’m interested in the replace situation outlined above. If some text is selected and you enter ctrl + h, the replace box should only replace text in the selected area. Can you tell me more about when this is not the case?
- Jason Baginski April 6, 2022 0
  
  Hey Denizhan. I just got burned a few times on the whole thing I was talking about. Every single one of the VS bug reports have been closed. Most "duplicate moved to" and moved to one that is closed. I went ahead and recorded a gif of what goes on and why it's so damned annoying.
  
  Find+Replace keeps switching to "Current Document" even if text selected
  
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  Hey Denizhan. I just got burned a few times on the whole thing I was talking about. Every single one of the VS bug reports have been closed. Most “duplicate moved to” and moved to one that is closed. I went ahead and recorded a gif of what goes on and why it’s so damned annoying.
  
  Find+Replace keeps switching to “Current Document” even if text selected
  
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- Jason Baginski March 22, 2022 0
  
  It's pretty easy to find in developercommunity.visualstudio.com. Here's two I'm familiar with.
  https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/t/It-is-impossible-to-search-on-selection/1512668
  https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/t/Find-and-Replace-with-Selection-Bug-Vis/1549735
  
  There's been a few fixes, but it seems to creep back up at random times. I'm just having to be extra careful. In most cases when I experience it I'm not in a position to stop the work I'm doing to attempt to submit a report(which likely I wouldn't be able to reproduce since it's so random). For...
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  It’s pretty easy to find in developercommunity.visualstudio.com. Here’s two I’m familiar with.
  https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/t/It-is-impossible-to-search-on-selection/1512668
  https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/t/Find-and-Replace-with-Selection-Bug-Vis/1549735
  
  There’s been a few fixes, but it seems to creep back up at random times. I’m just having to be extra careful. In most cases when I experience it I’m not in a position to stop the work I’m doing to attempt to submit a report(which likely I wouldn’t be able to reproduce since it’s so random). For the longest time I thought I was crazy until it was doing it nearly every time and I went searching and found others complaining.
  
  My point was “auto-saving can be horrible for some of us, very glad it’s optional”
  
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Bitsqueezer March 22, 2022

Theoretically a nice idea to not forget saving.

The real world is different from that: When I work with a document I don't want that it overwrites my existing file until I tell it to do so. Sometimes I test something and in the end decide, that it's not so good than the old version, so if Undo goes not far enough into the past, I can throw it away and reload my old file. Which...

Theoretically a nice idea to not forget saving.

The real world is different from that: When I work with a document I don’t want that it overwrites my existing file until I tell it to do so. Sometimes I test something and in the end decide, that it’s not so good than the old version, so if Undo goes not far enough into the past, I can throw it away and reload my old file. Which is gone because of autosave….
(By the way, same thing with other autosave applications like Office or even Windows system settings where I can’t simply press Cancel to not apply any of my changes.)

Of course I’m aware that I can enable the history function of Windows to have access to previous versions – but I don’t want that for the whole file system just to have a backup for some development files, so this is disabled always.
Of course I know that I can make a backup of my file before I start doing changes, but not so rare I forgot to do that.

So a better way of sharing the same file in different tools would be a RAM copy of my file which could be changed from any tool using what we had long time ago: A RAM disk. So whenever I open a file in VS, it is copied to the RAM disk and can then be changed in any tool by opening the file from there. Then an autosave only saves the file to the RAM disk, and so all other tools could do – without changing the file on disk. (As a security mechanism, the whole RAM disk could have a backup on disk similar to the Windows page file so everything is still existing if my computer crashes for any reason.)

Now every tool could work together on the same file and saving it on one could allow them to reload it at another (example: Notepad++ automatically detects when the file was changed outside the editor and allow to reload it). All tools would not change the original file but only the file in RAM disk. In VS you could then have a second save command to save the RAM version to the original place which VS knows as it was loaded from there.

Advantages:
– I can revert at any time to the original file
– Working with the file is faster as it is in RAM
– Other tools needs no change as it is a “normal” file in an additional drive letter (the RAM disk)
– Automatic backup of my file (RAM disk backup) without overwriting my original file so no fear to loose anything
– Windows file versioning could be used on a RAM disk also
– I have a real effect (as you described above) using this new autosave function as it would be saved in the RAM disk only without losing my original file until I decide to save it there

Technology is already existing, VS would only need to start the RAM disk while loading (if not already started) and offer a second command to save the file from RAM disk state to normal disk. RAM disk integration in Windows would be the perfect way to also use it for faster temp files etc.
A second “dirty” status comparing the RAM disk version with the saved file on harddisk can show if the version on disk is current and need to be saved. VS could also show a comparison window to see the changes from the version on disk and the version in RAM disk.

Just some idead to improve working with files… (and would be also great to use the same feature for any other application of course).

Szymon Dolny March 22, 2022 0

you should get some vcs
- Bitsqueezer March 22, 2022 0
  
  Of course a possible way to go, but I really don’t like VCS tools.
  And I do not want to setup a VCS project each time I work with a single file I opened in VS. An autosave destroys the original file in that case (or I switch it off, then the function is also useles…).
- Dante Gagne Author March 22, 2022 0
  
  We know that not everyone wants Autosave. That’s why the feature is *NOT* enabled by default and as far as I’m concerned, it feels like an option that folks should opt INTO. So, if it’s not for you, I completely get it. However, there are many folks who have requested this and I’m happy to finally make it available.

Daniel Marshall March 22, 2022

This is a very welcome feature. I flip between VS Code and VS2022 all day and often forget to save in VS. VS Code can save as you type, which should also be an option here in my opinion.

Dante Gagne Author March 22, 2022 0

VS Code provides options to save on a time interval, on loss of focus and… I think there’s a third option. We’re investigating more of those options for VS as well. There’s a link to DeveloperCommunity above (and I just put it here too) to upvote other types of Autosave. Please head over there and lend your votes and voice. 🙂

Suffer from Ctrl+S fatigue? We have a feature for you

What do you think?

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