Feature Request - disable autosave

[joesh1]

Hi Sam and Co

I've started teaching a Sonic-Pi course to all my students for the last few weeks of term.

Everything is going fine, except that I'm loosing time wiping previous students work. Since I teach a few hundred students, class after class, you can imagine that students come in and just use the previous students 'template'. It takes up quite a bit of teaching time to go round the class (14 computers), and make sure that there's no previous work.

Of course, in future lessons it will be a very useful thing. Part of the fun, I feel, is to pick up from where someone left off, and try to build something - which is the final week's lessons .. live coding (in groups) in front of the class, or maybe a live coding relay!

However, I'd like to ask for a preference option to be included in future, a possibility to 'not save' (if you see what I mean) when closing the program. This way it could be possible to have a clean slate when students open the program, which makes them start from scratch when learning.

Thanks for the fun program.

[samaaron]

Hi John,

Just a quick question - is it possible to give each student their own account? If so, they won't share their code with other users...

[joesh1]

Hi Sam
Do you mean on the computers? If so, it depends on which school I'm teaching in, or in some cases which classroom.

Best - Joe

[samaaron]

Hi Joe,

Apologies for calling you John!

Sonic Pi saves the code every time you hit the run button in a version control system in addition to when you close the app. This is something I'm very reluctant to enable users to prevent as it feels like more of an anti feature for the majority.

However, I recognise and sympathise with your issue and would like to find a solution that works for everyone. I think a good compromise would be to have a project feature which would allow users to create a new project full of empty workspaces. Would this work for you?

[joesh1]

Sounds like a good idea. I see you understand the problem, and I think we both agree that the default save in SP is (in reality) is a strong point, and its weak point, depending on which way you need to work. You know best about the internal coding problems to write something that will work. I just thought maybe a box to be ticked/unticked in the preferences might just be a useful idea - with automatically saved being the default.

I should add that I do indeed save templates/pieces to rework later, so the autosave feature is at times a blessing, especially when you have to stop at short notice!

Let me know what you think and I can bounce ideas off you if you need any feedback.

Thanks again.

p.s. Don't worry about the 'John'. I work abroad where people often confuse/assume/misread Joe is John, so as you can imagine I'm used to it by now.