Autosave

Periodically saves any open files in the current GIMP instance.

I got tired of searching for GIMP autosave and coming across developer discussions stating, in essence why autosave won't be implemented.

Installs a menu under <Image>/File/Autosave, containing "Enable", "Disable" and "Settings". From the settings dialog, you can enable/disable autosave globally, set the interval in minutes, and configure the location and pattern for autosave files of new and saved files individually. You can also edit the "autosave.conf" file in the same directory as the plugin script. Requires libgimp-perl and gtk2-perl. There is the standard version (autosave.pl), and one that prints debug messages on almost every operation (autosave.dbg.pl).

To use, simply download either the standard or debug version of the script to your plug-in directory (.gimp-$version/plug-ins on linux, don't know about other OSes)

There are some considerations:

• Currently, only one running instance is supported (that is, enabling/disabling autosave will enable/disable it for all GIMP processes).
• Per-image enable/disable is not currently incorporated
• I've only tested it on GIMP 2.6.7 and 2.7 on linux. I'd appreciate it, if anyone used this on any other version/OS, if you'd let me know if i works as advertised
• I could find no reliable way for it to start working automatically, i.e., without you having to do extra, so you have to do one of three things:
  • Whenever you start gimp, click File/Autosave/Enable
  • Start gimp from the command line, or write a small wrapper script with the command gimp -b "(autosave 1)"
  • Find gimp.desktop application file that your Desktop Environment use, and change the Exec=gimp %F (or gimp %U) line to Exec=gimp -b "(autosave 1)" %F (or gimp -b "(autosave 1)" %U)

Feedback/Suggestions are welcome.

Edit: It somehow slipped me that all distros are not equal. If you can't find the perl gimp package on your installation, install the Gimp package using CPAN. From the command line I believe that goes cpan install Gimp, or just browse to the module page and follow the install instructions there. You'll need to make sure that the location it installs to is in perl's @INC variable (like $PATH for perl), or move it to a directory that is in @INC. You can find out which directories are searched by typing at the command line perl -e 'print join "\n", @INC'.

Again, if anyone has any problems using this please feel free to ask, and I'll do what I can to assist. I'm especially interested to know how this works (if at all) on non-linux OSes.