Does Keyman Developer keep backups of your files? The program wasn’t compiling, and suggested it was because my file name had capital letters. (I’m not sure if that was actually the problem.) While trying to rename the program, I ended up overwriting it with an empty template. Is there any way to salvage it?
(Ugh, I feel dumb. I tried to create a second copy, but never checked if I succeeded. I also NEW what I was doing was dangerous, but didn’t take precautions. Argh!)
I’m sorry to hear that you lost the files. Sadly, no, Keyman Developer does not do backups of your source files. But this would be a nice feature in the future and I’m writing this up as a feature request.
FWIW, I use CrashPlan for automated backup of files as I work; some people use DropBox or other tools similarly. With those online backup tools, you can go back and retrieve recent versions of files in the event you lose your work.
Regarding the warning/error that Developer was giving about capital letters: this is related to distribution. Windows is forgiving about file name capitalization, which means that we as users tend to not worry when referencing files, for example referencing an image in a help html file.
However, some other platforms are strict, and that means, for example, a package that works on Windows might not work on, say, Linux, simply because somewhere one letter was not capitalized in a file reference.
So we made the decision that keyboard files should all be in lower case for similar reasons; and should not use any letters outside a-z, 0-9, and _ as well, for simpler transport across various mediums. (Another reason for keyboard filenames to use only those letters is that they are used as identifiers in the compiled Javascript, and this gives an exact match between the filename and the identifier without needing to do replacements for punctuation, etc. This also means the first letter of a keyboard filename must not be a digit).
Thanks for your response. I’ll have to start again after taking a break to recover.
Don’t give up yet! Keyman doesn’t back up files, but Windows does (unless it has been told not to). Right click the file in Windows and choose “Restore previous versions”. If something is there, great! If not, you are out of luck.
Generally I use git with my development projects, and stash or commit as needed.