[Coco] suggestion for Ultimuse

[KnudsenMJ at aol.com]

In a message dated 11/17/03 9:00:29 PM Eastern Standard Time, 
bdevries at gil.com.au writes:

> A suggestion for an addition to UltiMusE:
>  I call it helpful if there was an auto-save facility.

I had actually thought of Auto-Save at one point.  It's a (usually) desirable 
feature of GNU Emacs, the standard Linux editor.

One reason I never added Auto-Save is that sometimes you're making a trial 
change to your musical piece, and don't want to save it till you've given it a 
good hearing.  You save the piece before making the change.  Then, if you don't 
like it, you "back it out" simply by re-reading the saved copy.

I would NOT want UltiMusE to go auto-saving the experimental changes while I 
was still checking them out!  

Now, GNU Emacs gets around this objection by auto-saving to a different file 
name (appends a twiddle to the real name).  That would be OK, though Emacs 
neglects to clean up those temp files on exit.

You suggest engaging auto-save for new files, or when extending existing 
ones.  Why not do it for all editing operations?

Not clear how to set a timer that will go off every few minutes and tell UME 
to save the file.  Maybe spin off a separate timer process, that sends a known 
Signal type to UME every so often, which UME intercepts just like it catches 
Ctrl-E BREAKs?  Yes, use some of OS9's great multitasking and IPC signaling, 
which are easier to deal with than in Unix/Linux.

But then, should auto-save be done based on elapsed time, or on number of 
editing operations performed?  And does a big Block Transpose operation count 
more than jiggling one note up or down?  Seems that timing would be simpler!  
--Mike K.