Re: [Gimp-developer] Save/export, option to go back to old behaviour

[Rick Yorgason <rick firefang com>]

I understand the worry about losing work, but the change has almost caused me to
lose work, here's how:

1) I open an XCF file I've been working on and make some changes.
2) Before I'm finished, I'm distracted with another task: I have to crop/resize
a bunch of images.
3) I export each of those images, since I can't just "Save As".
4) I publish all those images. While publishing, I leave the images open in
Gimp, so I have the undo history in case of a last-minute emergency.
5) Satisfied, I quit Gimp. Of course, it tells me I have a whole bunch of images
that are unsaved, but I'm expecting that, because those images were merely
exported, not saved.  Lost in that big list of files is the original XCF file I
forgot I was working on.

Luckily I wasn't in a hurry, and I decided to carefully close the windows one by
one, just in case.

A naive fix for this particular problem would be to split the lists in the quit
warning into two separate lists: files that haven't been saved, and files that
have been neither saved nor exported.

But that's treating the symptom rather than the disease. To be honest, I
*really* like the separation of saving and exporting, and I applaud the Gimp
devs for implementing it. It's a powerful idiom for those who understand it.

I also understand that the Gimp devs are worried that (a) this idiom is alien to
a lot of users, and (b) it's easy to accidentally save instead of export. Those
are valid concerns.

But idiomatically, I really did want to "Save As" above. It's a way of
explicitly stating "This is the official file. I don't want you to warn me when
I close this."

Now, elsewhere in this thread an idea was floated that perhaps future versions
of Gimp could transparently save XCF versions of files that haven't been saved
as such.

I really like this idea. You could "undo close" a file, and even do that in a
persistent way. Now *that* would be powerful, because as useful as it is to sway
users away from making mistakes, being able to undo mistakes is always better.

And if this was implemented, there would be no danger in letting the user save
to whatever format they want, unlocking the full potential of the save/export
idiom.