A while back I wrote an article on saving buffers when they lose focus.

Recently I’ve packaged (an improved version of) this functionality into a tiny global minor mode called super-save.

The package is available on MELPA and MELPA Stable and enabling it is trivial:

(super-save-mode +1)

If you want to enable the additional feature of auto-saving buffers when Emacs is idle, add the following as well:

(setq super-save-auto-save-when-idle t)

If you’re like me and don’t care about the backups created by the built-in auto-save-mode, you can disable it aftewards:

(setq auto-save-default nil)

I’ve been using Emacs for over 10 years now and I’ve never needed the auto-created backups - I’m either very lucky or this is less useful than it’s supposed to be.