Wish IDE Wish List - Auto Save and Option to NOT use Tabs

I sure wish the IDE had a Auto Save feature.

The other night while writing a lot of code (without doing a compile) I happened to kick the power cord with my foot and shutdown my machine and lost a real lot of work. Sure seems like this would be easy to do.

It would also be nice if the IDE gave a way of requesting replacing Hard Tabs with Spaces. 30 years ago when my micro had a 20 meg (not gig meg - which was considered a lot) hard drive I could see have Hard Tabs to save space, now with TBs it is not necessary and actually a pain. I use a lot of different editors (some to view and some to code) and Hard Tabs cause the code to be misaligned where spaces will always cause the code to look like it should.

Maybe Santa will bring these for Christmas this year Ho, Ho, Ho - I doubt it.

BobVal

I'd like to repeat this request.

Auto-save everytime we switch tabs, and every X minutes to a backup folder.
If you can detect when windows hibernates/sleeps, do it then too

I also just lost another day of programming.

Seriously, if you program for an entire day without saving or running your program (which automatically saves), you are doing something wrong.

My advice:

* Develop a tick to click the save button every now and then. As soon as I feel I've finished something, even something small like a trivial sub, I save.

* Make frequent test runs. Testing early and often reduces bugs and saves wasted programming effort lost by going the wrong way.

* Remember, you can never have too many backups.

Another wish: Is it possible, to store the last successfull release version beside or behind the newer debug builds. Very often i am travelling and nearly the half of my projects are not runable, because i forget to make an release version at the end of the programming session. In this situation, instead or after showing "Waiting for IDE debugger to connect" it would be nice to get this question: "Do you want to run the last release version?".

Yes - SPACES instead of TABS
Yes - Auto Save when changing programs or after some time

I HATE TABS, can never get my code to align the way I like it. Sorry I am from the old school where we actually lined up our code.

I like tabs, but, if it was christmas and I could wish for anything I wanted, I'd wish for elastic tabstops (http://nickgravgaard.com/elastic-tabstops/). They really are the most intuitive and typographically pleasing variant I've seen.

By the way, using space to align only works at the beginning of the line if you use a proportional font.

I could live with the elastic-tabstops idea but am sure that is not going to happen in my life time (I'm 65)

Now lets be clear, I am not saying remove tabs, just an option to replace tabs with spaces