I'm evaluating IDEA9, and just run into an issue I wanted to clarify.  I had opened some random header file to try out IDEA's keyboard short-cuts.  After a few moments I had thoroughly messed up the file and then closed the tab.  Few moments later it dawned on me that IDEA had saved the file! Good thing it was running off of SVN so I did't lose anything.  Reading into documentation it became soon clear that this is how IDEA works ("IntelliJ IDEA saves changes automatically on exit.")  It's possible to disable this functionality, but then a changed file is closed quietly without prompting whether I would like to save the changes I just made.  Why is this?  In an old thread on these forums someone responded to a question "is it possible to get a save prompt everytime you close a modified file?" by saying: "No. Forget it. You don't need to save."

But I do need to save!  Very often I open a file, edit it, then use "Save as" to save it with a different name, and then close the original file, never saving it. Or I open a file, make tentative changes to it, and then decide not to use those changes after all, and just close the file to discard it. The automatic save-on-close makes either of these scenarios impossible, but disabling the auto-save isn't a solution either as equally frequently (or more frequently) I want to save a file I've made changes to. Perhaps this is just "the way IDEA IDE does things", but forcing developers to a particular workflow has never been successful even if there is a good reasoning behind a particular non-standard way of doing things.

So if this feature doesn't currently exist, would it be possible to have it added to IDEA in the next release? I would think it should be fairly easy to add since there are already the options to automatically save or to quietly discard an edited file.

Thanks for any insights on this!