>
> Why do you think an idle timer would be better?
>
> I prefer idle timers for this kind of thing as I find auto saving while I'm working to be distracting, and
> occasionally slows me down at least on my slow computer, and barely noticeable on my fast one. As not
> everyone has super fast modern equipment, I'm guessing we prefer to be respectful of older setups. I have
> three autosave timers set up in my configuration, and even one is distracting enough.
>
> The timer I put in save-place is an idle timer, and now is a good time to debate idle vs. absolute timers for
> these.
A disadvantage of idle timers is that they can miss changes. This
might be more significant for the save-place case, since by the time
Emacs is idle, the file you visited might no longer be visited in any
buffer.
Changes to the save-place-alist in memory are not lost unless there is an Emacs crash or an abnormal Emacs shutdown. Same for savehist-minibuffer-history-variables which are accumulated in memory until persisted.
It's the interval to persist the save-place-alist that we're talking about. I think using an idle timer in both saveplace and savehist will not cause a real-world issue. If people are truly concerned about persisting they should set a very short timer and idleness occurs frequently, in practice.