title: "Saving" sidebar_position: 3

Saving

Saves are atomic: 012 writes a temporary file and renames it. Saving over the open file when something else wrote it since it was opened or last saved (another program, or another session of 012 serve) asks first: Enter overwrites, S saves under another name, Esc cancels. Save as (and :w name, :wq name with vim keys) onto another file that exists asks the same way: Enter replaces it, Esc cancels, and cancelling :wq's question cancels its quit too.

Under 012 serve, a session that idles out or is ended by the server stopping keeps its unsaved changes in .012-recovery/ in the served directory, and the next session opening that file offers them back: see Serving over SSH.

If 012 crashes

An internal error (a bug, a Go panic) stops 012 rather than leaving the terminal broken: the screen goes back to what the shell showed, and 012 says what happened and where it put things:

012: stopped on an internal error (a panic in update: ...)
012: unsaved changes kept in ~/.config/012/recovery/%2FUsers%2Fann%2Fbudget-20260929-101112.012; open budget.012 again to restore them
012: a report is in ~/.config/012/crashes/crash-20260929-101112.txt; include it when reporting the problem

Unsaved changes are written, the whole workbook, to recovery/ in 012's config directory (the one 012 config path prints the config file of, ~/.config/012 on Linux), named after the file's full path. Opening that file again, or starting 012 on nothing for a sheet never saved, asks on the context line: Enter restores them as unsaved changes to the file, D deletes them, Esc leaves them for next time. Saving a restored workbook removes its recovery file. Nothing is kept without unsaved changes, and only the newest three files per name.
The report goes to crashes/ beside it: where the error happened, the error, its stack of calls, 012's version, the system, the file's name and where its changes went, never what the workbook holds. The newest ten are kept.

If the error happened while drawing the screen, the terminal also shows the stack of calls above those lines. Under 012 serve, the session's changes go to .012-recovery/ as above, the client is told that 012 stopped on an internal error, and the report goes to the server's log.