Hi,
I guess we're trying to address two issues here:

1) you work and document your experiments in the Workspace -> then close the Workspace by mistake -> work's gone
---> recovering closed windows would solve this (Chris)

2) again, you work in the Workspace and don't want to save the image -> then crash and lose the image -> work's gone
---> here I need to know to fileout the Workspace before the (expected) crash; optional fileout associated with Accept (CTRL+s) sounds nicely "intuitive" but if this approach breaks some other considerations I'm not fully aware of then any form of "teaching" the user like the "first time message" about the dangers and options might be very helpful (Jakob)

best,
~~~
^[^    Jaromir

Sent from Squeak Inbox Talk

On 2022-01-26T14:38:47-06:00, asqueaker at gmail.com wrote:

> My solution would be to allow the user to recover any of the last 10
> closed windows via the Window menu.  Debuggers could be excluded, if
> necessary.
> 
>  - Chris
> 
> On Wed, Jan 26, 2022 at 1:01 AM Marcel Taeumel <marcel.taeumel at hpi.de> wrote:
> >
> > Hi Chris --
> >
> > > Workspaces are saved in the image. New users are trained to save
> > their image very early on. [...] So it's actually already pretty hard to lose anything "important" [...]
> >
> > It would be helpful if you would address the issue that Workspaces look like the code-editing facilities in Browser/MessageSet/Debugger. There, you can hit CMD+S and do not have to care about the lifetime of that tool window. It's rather unrelated to the fact that you have to learn save the image. That kind of inconsistency between Workspaces and Browser/MessageSet/Debugger has been around for a very long time. It's about time we improve on it. ;-) I am pretty sure there were reasons back then in the old days, when message sends where expensive and file access was as well. Nowadays, that's not the case anymore. So we can -- and should -- focus on usability a little bit more. Make the system robust. Value the user's input and make sure that it does not get lost through little usability slips.
> >
> > Best,
> > Marcel
> >
> > Am 26.01.2022 02:19:10 schrieb Chris Muller <asqueaker at gmail.com>:
> >
> > (Tim)
> > > > I've never noticed any confusion with the general case of Workspace and 'accept'; all it has ever done (we're talking around 40 years practice here) is save the content to a string as a backup.
> > >
> > > (Marcel)
> > > What kind of intransparent, fragile "backup" would that be? You hit the window's close button and that "backup" is gone. In my opinion, that's not a "backup".
> > >
> > > (Jaromir)
> > > So similarly I’d expect to find my last accepted Workspace changes somewhere - and I don’t know where - is this what I’m still missing? And quite logically then, if I crash my image...
> >
> > Workspaces are saved in the image. New users are trained to save
> > their image very early on. Not only that, assuming they were taught
> > that Workspaces are for playing with Smalltalk code, then they can
> > find all their most recent DoIt's (et al) in the change history. Like
> > any backup one could poke holes in, Workspaces are backed up
> > well-enough relative to their use-cases.
> >
> > So it's actually already pretty hard to lose anything "important",
> > unless they decided to put their Last Will and Testament into a
> > workspace window and forgot to save the image... :)
> >
> > Humor aside, there's only so much protection we can try to layer on to
> > guide users, but their curious exploration (hopefully!) will still
> > always lead them to minor setbacks. Once learned, I doubt many will
> > care for the system to constantly remind them. Unless Squeak can get
> > "Ignore this message in the future" functionality, I predict these
> > post pop-ups will eventually be removed from the code.
> >
> > Best,
> > Chris
> >
> >
> 
>