Save All - No Default Key Binding - Philosophy?

[Engineer]

Hi, the save_all command has no default key binding. “Save all” is such a common command that I surmise that the lack of default key binding is purposeful based on some philosophy (e.g. auto-save).

Is a philosophy behind this lack of default key binding for “save all” such that rather than complain about that, one would fare better to understand the reasoning behind no default key binding?

(If such a philosophy does exist, then what I would complain about is why the philosophy isn’t stated, knowing that many will wonder why such a common command has no default key binding ).

The answers that a “Save All” key binding in less needed, e.g. save by build, and that lack of available keys are helpful. (I’m accustomed to ctrl+shift+s for save all, but I see that others have had a different experience based on their usual editors).

Thank You Keith and B. Schaaf

[kingkeith]

I personally almost never use “save_all”… why? Building saves all anyway, but I don’t use any tools which watch files for changes to trigger any actions so I’m used to the workflow of editing a file, saving it and then switching to a different tab/file, editing that and saving it.

If I were relying on such a tool, then of course the file watcher trigger action would have lots of broken states while one file is saved and another hasn’t been updated yet. And likely I’d need to adapt.

So I’m pretty sure the reason is two fold:

• Build systems reduce the need for manually triggering a save all
• Hard to decide what would make a sensible default keybinding for it

[bschaaf]

ctrl+shift+s is the binding for Save As in almost every single application; including on macOS where adding shift to the save binding cmd+s is also Save As.

[bschaaf]

As you can see from the vscode issue you linked the default is save-as, not save-all. You can also see from the upvotes in the issues that people vastly prefer save-as. Save-as is also used in Notepad. VS however does use save-all, so Microsoft themselves are inconsistent here.

As for why there isn’t a default keybinding I can only give you a reason why I wouldn’t add one today and that’s because there’s isn’t a good key combination for it that’s in common usage besides ctrl+shift+s.

[deathaxe]

The easy it is to add custom key bindings for nearly everything the worthless a discussion to push personal preferences to all users is.

[Mitranim]

ST does have a default hotkey for save_all. It’s "super+alt+s" on MacOS and I use it all the time.