Seems like Glyphs is always writing the auto-saves as .glyphpackage, no matter whether the original file is .glyphs.
Is this new?
This behaviour is clogging my Dropbox. I am currently working on TT hinting, proofing the fonts on my Windows computer via Dropbox. This process used to be really snappy; after export the .ttf would be updated on the other computer within a second or so.
Now I have to wait unnecessarily long for the .ttf to appear on the other computer, because Glyphs writes the .glyphpackage very often and this takes up most of Dropbox’s capacity.
Can’t we simply have .glyphs auto-saves just like before?
I also ran into this issue, another annoyance is when the Autosave is removed Dropbox notifies you that you’ve deleted 4000 files and you can’t check whether you really deleted something important.
Is it impossible to deactivate auto-save altogether? Ideally, this setting would be, “Don’t auto-save this file until I close it,” so that I don’t forget to re-activate it.
Oh dear, I was expecting this kind of answer. I consider myself a rational and mature person, and I have been working with Dropbox as well as Git on many projects – code and type design – for many years. Please allow me to decide for myself which setup suits which project.
FWIW, I have been storing all my code (of all sorts) in GitHub repos within Dropbox for many years, without any problems whatsoever. They play together nicely even though people keep telling me otherwise.
The saving itself is not the problem. The issue is the syncing mechanism of Dropbox, which is incompatible with packages. That was a big issue with UFOs, which have a very similar package structure. There used to be a way to exclude files or to establish a delay for the sync (autosave files disappear when you Cmd-S). At one point, don’t remember when, I think it was six or seven years ago, that didn’t work anymore. Though I have been told that it still is, somehow, but it just became too cumbersome to maintain (also for others I had to integrate into the workflow, I had to tell them to turn off Dropbox and turn it back on at the end of their workday), that I switched everything to git.
Autosave files (both .glyphs and .glyphspackage) are also excluded from iCloud Drive.
However, the mechanisms we use to exclude these autosave files from cloud sync requires a somewhat recent version of macOS (minimum macOS 12.5, or maybe macOS 13, Apple does not have good documentation on this).
Just a thought: How about writing the autosave files into ~/Library/Application Support/Glyphs 3/Autosave or similar? That way they would be kept outside of Dropbox or iCloud.
I am by no means a macOS expert but surely ist must be possible for an app to write these files somewhere. If Application Support is not the right location then it would be somewhere else.
Today, I am working on a project with a deadline and can’t risk installing a different version. Will try by the end of the week. The solution using Glyphs.defaults is good enough for now.
Works for me! This is interesting. There is also a little cloud icon with a stroke through it in Finder. May I ask how it’s possible to set this? I may want to use the mechanism for other purposes.
The autosave files are annotated with extended attributes. This can be done from the command line like so:
xattr -w 'com.apple.fileprovider.ignore#P' 1 PATH
and
xattr -w com.dropbox.ignored 1 PATH
The first attribute is used by Apple’s system file sync API, used by iCloud and newer versions of Dropbox. The second attribute is used by older versions of Dropbox.
