New in Repls: autosave, custom urls, and more

HO

Haya Odeh

We are always excited about launching new features and sharing with you, our dear users, what we’ve been up to. For the past few months, Amjad, Mason and I have been working hard and last night we quietly launched the new repl features. These features required a lot of infrastructure and data changes which is always tricky to execute. We ran into some technical difficulties last night with the data migration but was able to bring the site back up and things have been running relatively smoothly since then.

However, since radical changes were required to get this out we’re still working through some of the issues. If you see a bug or if you have a repl that’s not working please let us know and we’ll fix it. We hope we have your support as we work through the issues. One thing we can promise you is that this change will unlock so many amazing features and long-term stability and reliability starting today.

Note that the classroom product is not affected by this at all. This is only a “repls” product change.

Now on to the new features 🥁🥁

Autosave

When we promise we deliver. As of last night your code is autosaved by default. The new interface will include only two buttons: the run and the share button. You don’t need to worry about saving your code anymore, we’ll do it for you, so no code is lost, all your work is saved in (my repls) .

Name your Repl or we’ll name it for you 😊

If you have an existing untitled repl, or if you can’t be bothered to name your Repl -- guess what -- we’ll do it for you! You might end up with incredibly funny names (thanks to the folks at GfyCat for pioneering this). Personally I can’t wait to see what Repl.it will name my untitled Repl! it’s so random! Here is what recent Repl looked like.

Unified Repl URLS (no more janky revisions)

Okay okay.. Before you freak out about lack of revisions.

freak out gif
freak out gif

All your code’s history is accessible under a new label called History.

Your new Repl has but one URL, and that’s because it’s autosaved -- meaning every time you change a file in your Repl, it will be automatically saved, and a copy of that file before the change will be stored in your Repl History.

If you need to go back to one of your previous revisions, you can do that by clicking on the three dots menu on the right of the repl and click on History.

Revisions are sorted by date, with the newest first. By default we show only the latest from each day, but if you want to drill down each day you can. If you click the restore button, the file will be restored to that revision. It’s okay if you did that by mistake because you can go back and restore the previously latest revision which will now be just one record before the last one.

As mentioned above, there is a lot more to this change that is more technical and will allow us to ship more exciting features in the near future. We'll do a technical write up soon if you're interested.

Hope you like the new updates and, as always, we’d love to hear from you and if you have any feedback let us know on our feedback channel.

Happy weekend and happy repling!

Haya & the Repl.it team

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