Discussion
Just wrote an exceptionally long issue in Github and as I was finishing it, my finger grazed what I believe to be the "escape" key and it just disappeared. Totally gone. No "are you sure?" box like normal. No recovery. Opening an issue did not restore it
Wha :(
Did I just get transported back to Netscape 4
@mcc When shit like this happens to me I'll start typing stuff in Joplin or vim and then copying and pasting them into input forms for a while until I decide that's too much of a PITA and go back to typing long things in directly and it happens to me again. I have no practical advice, only commiseration. 😩
@mcc you may be able to recover it by strings'ing the process memory. I have done this before.
@mcc ugh, that's terrible, it's been some time i didn't have that, but i used to dump /proc/kcore and strings|grep the content for my stuff if i cared enough about it, it did work a few times. (then needed some cleanup, but at least, that can be automated.
the ratio of memory to available disk space was different back then though.
@tshirtman @gsuberland Every woman I have ever dated has tried to convince me to install one of those plugins that autostores every <textarea> you type in to disk. But I'm always like "maybe it will never happen again". And I am never right.
@mcc @gsuberland That sounds like a neat idea actually, sometimes when i type something long i decide actually would rather edit this in vim, so i copy, edit there, and copy back when i'm done, which creates the backup as a side effect, (i've been burned by youtube comments a lot too, typing anything consequential in there is really a dangerous life), but it's still not an ingrained reflex, i think a plugin that would see it's getting long (in size and time spent) and nudge me in that direction would be really useful.
@tshirtman @gsuberland there are several such plugins. a couple days ago someone recommended me a specific one in my mentions… someone else immediately responded to say it sucked
@mcc a lot of modals will do this to me if I have the gall to drag the mouse outside of the modal box while selecting text, infuriating!
@mcc that sucks its so annoying when it happens
@mcc If only you could be so lucky.
@mcc Yeah, it's really bad. I always go to the full-page issue compose UI rather than the pop-up one they're trying to get us to use now, precisely because the pop-up one is unsafe like that,
@dalias I do this literally every time I remember, literally for this reason, but this time I forgot
(I also refuse to use Mastodon 5 for the same reason. According to Mastodon devs Mastodon 5 doesn't even have this problem. But due to Github, I have trauma)
Install Fedizen
Get the full app experience
@mcc
This is why I never type long of text directly into web browsers. I've had this experience a couple of times while doing annual reviews and it sucked losing everything I typed.
If I know I'm going to write a long piece of text nowadays, it goes into a document, then I cut and paste it into the web browser.
cc: @lisamelton