There was some discussion on the PR that added auto-save on focus loss: #3178 (comment)

This could be added to the auto-save configuration so that you could configure either or both events for auto saving:

auto-save = ["focus-lost", "idle"]

I'm also thinking that the idle-timeout is too short for this - it will save very aggressively. An auto-save timer should probably have a much longer duration like 10+ seconds

This could be added to the auto-save configuration so that you could configure either or both events for auto saving:

auto-save = ["focus-lost", "idle"]

I'm also thinking that the idle-timeout is too short for this - it will save very aggressively. An auto-save timer should probably have a much longer duration like 10+ seconds

Yeah, I think having a separate timer and all relevant configuration being done in auto-save option would be preferred.

Though I'm not sure what should be the behavior in case of a boolean value for auto-save, which should be handled properly in order to not break existing configurations.

Perhaps, true could just be an alias for current behavior of focus-lost and have false disable both to avoid interference with existing configs.

What was the reason why this was dropped? This seems like a good change...

Author probably lost interest. Either way I do think this needs a seperate timers, piling more on idle tineout is not a good idea and idle-timeout is also way to short for autosave. I agree with @the-mikedavis this needs atleast a 10s timer. Probably even longer. The config also needs to be changed as mentioned above.

For the timer this should probably be based on #8021 which makes it really easy to add new event based timers. In this case the timer should be reset whenever a document revision is created (saving in insert mode is broken so that should not.happen there).

What was the reason why this was dropped? This seems like a good change...

The implementation was shotty at best, I'm looking to pick this back up once I have some time on hand.

this needs atleast a 10s timer.

I personally feel that it would be great to have a shorter timer, of maybe a second or two, for the purpose of code diagnostics; though this will of course vary a lot.

Regardless, given this variation, I think it would definitely make sense to have it be a configuration option, with a reasonable default of 10+ s.