Ask for confirmation before losing unsaved changes

[egmontkob]

Calling it a "Skin Editor", providing an editable text file with and a button to apply the changes and another to download the file, obviously all encourage a workflow of editing the file in the browser.

Yet, it's very easy to lose changes:

• Close the browser tab
• Switch to a different skin in the Skin Editor.

These actions should ask for confirmation if there are unsaved (undownloaded) changes.

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Alternatively, would we want to rebrand / rework it to a read-only Skin Viewer?

People could use a more familiar text editor of their choice. There'd be an Upload button on the homepage that displays the uploaded skin. (You can easily follow this workflow already if you copy-paste the file's contents into the textarea, or if you run the Skin Editor locally.)

Instead of a black-and-white HTML textarea, we could reasonably color the skin file (each color name with itself), or present the color in a popup window on hover, or highlight the corresponding entry from the palette (if it's a 256-palette color). When hovering over a keyword, we could flash the corresponding cells in the screenshot.

Sure it needs some development (which I'm not planning to do now), but might be a direction to go in the future.

[zyv]

Alternatively, would we want to rebrand / rework it to a read-only Skin Viewer?

I think that purposefully degrading the functionality out of fear that someone would inadvertently lose changes is very annoying. Nobody has complained so far, and the user base is obviously very limited.

I'd rather think in the direction of saving the changes as they are done in local storage:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/localStorage

[egmontkob]

I think that purposefully degrading the functionality

Well, it wouldn't be degrading, it would be trading them for a different set of cool features :) but surely, partially driven by this fear, so your point is right.

I'd rather think in the direction of saving the changes as they are done in local storage:

Could be another way to go, indeed. I'm not familiar with this technology at all.

[zyv]

I think that purposefully degrading the functionality

Well, it wouldn't be degrading, it would be trading them for a different set of cool features :) but surely, partially driven by this fear, so your point is right.

I don't see how suggested features require removing online editing and instead only allowing cumbersome uploads. Check this out: https://codemirror.net .

I'd rather think in the direction of saving the changes as they are done in local storage:

Could be another way to go, indeed. I'm not familiar with this technology at all.

Well, check my other link for more details. And the interface could indeed be improved so that inadvertent overwrites of the contents by loading skins won't happen so easily.

[egmontkob]

I don't see how suggested features require removing [...]

Fair enough. Let's forget this stupid idea.

Well, check my other link for more details.

I definitely will whenever I get to work on this issue. Thanks for the link!