Turn off Auto-Save in Gmail

Yesterday, and not for the first time, I lost an hour's work in Gmail.

I have my macro-capable keyboard set up to type á whenever I type Ctrl-a. (Likewise, similar for é,í,ó,ú,ñ,¿ and ¡). If I have the macro function turned off on the keyboard, then Ctrl-a is just a Ctrl-a.

Now, if I want to underline something I am typing in Gmail, I type Ctrl-u, quickly discover that I just typed ú instead of turning on underlining, so I switch macros off, backspace to delete the ú, and do it again. No problem.

Until... I want to type á, like in San Luis Soyatlán. With macros off, instead of á, the entire document instantly becomes highlighted, then the final "n" in Soyatlán replaces an hour's work, at which time AutoSave unerringly picks that exact moment to save the draft.

I don't need AutoSave. How can I turn it off?

tanstaafl.

Too late now but you could/should have pressed Ctrl-Z to undo the n replacing all the text.

As for auto-save I'm nearly 100% sure you cannot turn it off and by Googling, that seems to be confirmed

Though the CTRL-Z suggestion is good, and though your particular case happens to be a corner you painted yourself into that you could easily paint yourself out of, I still think you might have a valid case for a bug report. I think that your description of your problem, if simplified, could be filed as a bug to google, for them to fix:

"Shouldn't autosave if the user's last text change was to select all and delete. User never wants autosave to save the deletion of a giant amount of text."

I did that within one or two seconds after my text went away, but Gmail had already autosaved the new draft.

tanstaafl.

Autosave should not have effected the ctrl-z function, I'd consider that a bug.

Why not use alt-codes like the rest of us old timers?

Because I use those special characters a lot, and it is much faster and more mnemonic to type ctrl-e than it is to remember and then type alt-130.

tanstaafl.

Or better yet, "Ctrl-z should un-save the autosave."

tanstaafl.

No Ctrl-Z should undo what was typed. Overriding it with some auto-save feature will not really do what you want and will be confusing.

Ctrl-Z works. I just tried it. Edit document, wait for "saving" to complete, it says "Saved" and then Ctrl-Z went back before the save. I even tried a Ctrl-A then deleted the lot, waited for the save and then fully restored with Ctrl-Z.

Tony's fix would get complicated. How does it know when to save? A simple delete all is easy to detect. What if it's a whole paragraph? When does it start autosaving again? ...and so on....

Ctrl+Z should work, unless you navigated elsewhere in the meantime. Did you map something else to Ctrl+Z too?

Though I haven't used it, I've had this one recommended to me.

-jk

That is a really cute program, I'll give it a try, although I am so used to typing Ctrl-a to get the á it will take a bit of concentration to switch over to ShiftLock a to do it. I like that in order to actually use ShiftLock as ShiftLock you have to double-tap it. That will prevent the annoying accidental employment of ShiftLock when I don't want it.

Thank you.

tanstaafl.

Very cool idea. Make the Caps Lock actually useful for once!