How to Vim: Auto-save on Activity

Coming from Emacs, one of the things I missed most in Vim was auto-saving. I’ve been using my own super-save Emacs package for ages – it saves your buffers automatically when you switch between them, when Emacs loses focus, and on a handful of other common actions. After years of using it I’ve completely forgotten that C-x C-s exists. Naturally, I wanted something similar in Vim.

The Autocommand Approach

Vim’s autocommands make it straightforward to set up basic auto-saving. Here’s what I ended up with:

autocmd FocusLost,InsertLeave * silent! update

This saves the current buffer when Vim loses focus (you switch to another window) and when you leave Insert mode. A few things to note:

• update instead of w – it only writes when the buffer has actually changed, avoiding unnecessary disk writes.
• silent! – suppresses errors for unnamed buffers and read-only files that can’t be saved.

You can extend this with more events if you like:

autocmd FocusLost,InsertLeave,TextChanged * silent! update

Adding TextChanged catches edits made in Normal mode (like dd, x, or paste commands), so you’re covered even when you never enter Insert mode.

FocusLost works reliably in GUI Vim and most modern terminal emulators, but it may not fire in all terminal setups (especially inside tmux without additional configuration). One more point in favor of using Ghostty and not bothering with terminal multiplexers.

Neovim

The same autocommands work in Neovim. You can put the equivalent in your init.lua:

vim.api.nvim_create_autocmd({ "FocusLost", "InsertLeave", "TextChanged" }, {
  command = "silent! update",
})

Neovim also has autowriteall (:set autowriteall) which automatically saves before certain commands like :next, :make, and Ctrl-Z. It’s not a full auto-save solution, but it’s worth knowing about.

Auto-save Plugins

There are several plugins that take auto-saving further, notably vim-auto-save for Vim and auto-save.nvim for Neovim.

Most of these plugins rely on CursorHold – an event that fires after the cursor has been idle for updatetime milliseconds. The problem is that updatetime is a global setting that also controls how often swap files are written, and other plugins depend on it too. Setting it to a very low value (say, 200ms) for snappy auto-saves can cause side effects – swap file churn, plugin conflicts, and in Neovim specifically, CursorHold can behave inconsistently when timers are running.

For what it’s worth, I think idle-timer-based auto-saving is overkill in Vim’s context. The simple autocommand approach covers the important cases, and anything more aggressive starts fighting against Vim’s grain.

I’ve never been fond of the idle-timer approach to begin with, and that’s part of the reason why I created super-save for Emacs. I like the predictability of triggering save by doing some action.

Or Just… Save Manually

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

– Leonardo da Vinci

Here’s the thing I’ve come to appreciate about Vim: saving manually isn’t nearly as painful as it is in Emacs. In Emacs, C-x C-s is a two-chord sequence that you type thousands of times a day – annoying enough that auto-save felt like a necessity. In Vim, you’re already in Normal mode most of the time, so a quick mapping like:

nnoremap <leader>w :update<CR>

gives you a fast, single-keystroke save (assuming your leader is Space, which it should be). It’s explicit, predictable, and takes almost no effort.

As always, I’ve learned quite a bit about Vim by looking into this simple topic. That’s probably the main reason I still bother to write such tutorial articles – they make me reinforce the knowledge I’ve just obtained and make ponder more than usual about the trade-offs between different ways to approach certain problems.

I still use the autocommand approach myself – old habits die hard – but I have to admit that <Space>w gets the job done just fine. Sometimes the simplest solution really is the best one.

That’s all I have for you today. Keep hacking!