[Libreoffice-ux-advise] Crash recovery dialog

[Stefan Knorr]

Hi Kendy, Michael,

Additional to the problems you both describe (not very context-aware,
recovers read-only documents, recovers even empty documents), one of the
more depressing things is how much waiting [1] it often takes to get
through the wizard (or clickery to finish it prematurely).

One hopefully simple way to get rid of the assistant on the start of
LibreOffice would be to use one of our shiny new info bars instead,
asking something like
"LibreOffice seems to have crashed the last time you used it. Would you
like to recover the 2 documents you had open? [Recover] [Close]"

Then simply open the two documents and you've gotten rid of the whole
wizard...

Some other things we could do better about the crash recovery ... partly
stolen from your two mails (in order of perceived increasing hardness):

* Detect empty (i.e. equal to the default template) and read-only
documents and don't even save those for recovering.

* Detect when the last auto-saved document is the same as the user-saved
one.

* When a document is not recovered after the first restart, offer the
user to recover the specific file again when he is opening it.

* Write incremental diffs as auto-save files, not always the complete
file.

* Write auto-save files asynchronously.

* It should save more often. Gmail saves every single keystroke I make,
~so should LibreOffice. Maybe there is a solution where you'd have a
helper process (that wouldn't go down with LibreOffice) that saves any
changes to RAM first and to disk every two minutes or when LibreOffice
crashes (this wouldn't help enough with power outages, though).


Regards,
Astron.


[1] I know, it might be two seconds, but at that point, we've already
broken the users flow... to me, it always feels much longer.