Prevent working copy changes in the Web IDE from being lost

People can be hesitant to use web based editors because browsers crash, internet connections occur, and server side errors happen. These can cause significant amounts of work to vanish. Losing even 15 minutes of careful work can be very frustrating. The Web IDE encourages people to make larger and more complex modifications across multiple files, it is important they feel confident these changes won't be lost easily.

Proposal

Save modifications in local storage so that changes can be recovered if the browser crashes

We may later shift towards saving these changes, not to local storage, but to the user space on the server. This way the user could shift machines quickly and go on changing their files.

Google docs uses a very simple mechanism for this. Simply stating either saving... all changes are saved or last edit was on ...

We can use the same principle here:

Note: We could delay the "last edit" functionality as this has most value if multiple people could edit... although it is a nice touch.

Links

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/4589#note_70038130