The eaters of writing
I can now add logjam (segfaults on file save failure or something like it), and the unholy combination of Perspective Broker, Movable Type and Mozilla Firefox (PB loses the connection, Firefox loses a large chunk of the text when I hit ‘Back’ and MT saves using the web connection… yeah, the one that just broke) to the list of products that have now cost me hours of writing which I will never be able to recreate.
So, when answering the question “when doing something like browsing my email [or other text writing], what is it that I use a non-web-based client for?” my answer is “stopping me from having to rewrite pieces of writing I was much happier with the first time, and also from letting out heart-felt yells that wake the entire household.”
I thought losing a long Advogato entry at lca was enough to teach me this lesson but it wasn’t. Here we go again: Never ever write anything you’d be sad to lose in anything other than a text editor written by crazy pedantic hackers with wrist problems, ideally ones who have revisions in their swap files.
Anyone other than crazy pedantic hackers with wrist problems seems a bit cavalier about all that junk that you foolishly left in RAM. Crashes while saving are particularly unforgivable. I write anything longer than a paragraph in web-based clients when hell freezes over or <textarea> entries are considered sacred, whatever happens first.