Importance of Ctrl+S

Yes, one might wonder what is the importance of the key combination Ctrl+S. But as a programmer who codes a lot, I can tell you from my experience that its very important!! Those of use who live in India, must be very well aware of the power problems. Ofcourse there are those devices we know as UPS(Un-interrupted Power Supply) but well, they are not always there to save you.

When I was in my BSc, I would sit for hours in the lab coding away madly. Now in the beginning, I didn’t have the habit of saving my work now & then, and unfortunately, the lab didn’t have any UPS for the PCs that we students used, only the block servers & the main server had their luxury!! There were power generators but they had to be started manually & PCs used to shutdown as soon as power went out. And its quite obvious to anyone who’s lived in Delhi or other parts(except Mumbai I should say) of the country, the power cuts are more frequent in the summers. So ofcourse a lot of my code used to obliviate when the power went out for a break!!

Then I thought that to counter this situation, I should try to hit Ctrl+S after every line or so, so that instead of loosing out on 1 hour’s worth of code, I’d loose only a few lines at most. It was odd in the beginning, hitting Ctrl+S every now & then, but then it sunk in gradually. It became a habit to hit Ctrl+S after every line & sometimes before that as well, so the power cuts didn’t affect me as much as they used to earlier!!

I also reaped the benefits when I joined my first full-time job. There was some problem in the UPS & it used to trip sometimes, possibly due to increased load, & some PCs were re-booted as power went out & came back, mine among them!! But as I had my habit of hitting Ctrl+S after every line, I wasn’t affected much again, though my collegue who used to sit next to me didn’t have such habit & was always left cursing when the power went out or came back, as he lost lot of code because of that power play.

Its not that Ctrl+S is useful only to programmers, its useful to others as well, whether they designers or copy-writers, its just that since I’m a programmer, I stated it out from my perspective!!

So this is what I advise from my experience, that having the habit of hitting Ctrl+S after every change of code(design/text etc.) will save you a lot of trouble almost all times. Even if you have a UPS & if the power doesn’t go out, still, having this habit won’t do any harm to you. My PC doesn’t re-boot on its own will now, but yet I retain the habit & don’t plan to loose it. :tup: