gedit a la Windows
 

I found a "feature" that is very annoying in "Gedit" which comes with Debian 7.
If you open a file with Gedit and then make changes to it, then try to change the file name by one letter before saving it, it makes an archive of your new file. I suspect it would do so even if you changed the name completely although I do not have the time to try that.

I found the only way to avoid this was to copy and paste the contents to a new "unsaved document" and make the changes before renaming and saving it .

If somebody think I am missing something, I am ready to apologise to "Gedit" maintainers but I just cannot understand why these people want to do things "behind your back, a la Windows" as if they know better than you what you need or want.

Define 'archive'

i don't understand this.
what letter? what sort of archive? a compressed archive or what? a backup copy?

I'm guessing OP means a backup copy, for example, if you are editing foo, it creates foo~.

OP, on the menu, go to Edit-->Preferences-->Editor. At least on v. 3.8.3, you can turn that behavior off in the Editor dialog.

Thank you for your comments.
To AlucardZero: it is obvious this is not a question, it is a statement, therefore I am not asking for "an answer", I have the answer as I explained in my post and it is good enough for my needs.

To ondoho: the archive I am talking about is an archive, not a backup (an archive is an archive), it needs to be "unpacked" or "extracted", it is a "compressed" archive, not a backup copy that adds "~" at the end of the name of the file and it does not matter what letter is changed as it makes it a different file name.

I also found "cp" does the same thing, at least on my machine, it may not be a purely "Gedit" feature after all. I do not have enough experience to investigate.

My only wish is that this could be sorted out by "hackers" (in the good sense of the word) who like, or feel a need, to investigate those problems and improve something for the Linux community as I am sure I am not the only one to have that behaviour and many who have it may silently put up with it with a disgruntled view of Linux or Debian. We also have to remember Debian bases its reputation on stability and although this is not "unstable", it is an unwanted feature.

It seems to me "Gedit" and "Bash" (in my case) are using a common application (Gnome ?) that has this "feature" (again I am not experienced enough to give a better explanation of what I found).
The problem is repeatable (It does it every time).
Platform:
Debian 7 (from DVD's, unaltered, no modifications applied, installed and used "straight out of the box")
Gnome 1:3.4+7
Bash 4.2+dfsg-0.1
Gedit 3.4.2-1

Hi there,

and all he did was ask you to clarify what you meant by "archive", because that's a very generic term.

So not the usual backup copy, okay. Because that's what I guessed, too, from your terse description. So the counter question stands: What archive - tar, gz, rar, zip, anything else?

But you really should, because oviously there's something very, very weird going on. I've never heard of a system creating archives just like that without explicitly being instructed to.

It's okay to call for other people's help if you can't sort out the problem on your own. But since it is so out-of-place, you have to give more details. Like, what kind of archive, under what circumstances, what operations are affected. We don't have a lose end yet to pull at.

Neither gedit nor bash actually interact with Gnome (which is not an application, but the entire desktop environment, and gedit is a component of it).

And there must be some other package(s) involved, because gedit or bash don't usually do what you describe. Maybe some shrewd backup software that monitors changes in the file system and creates archives of files before they're changed, so you can roll back the previous state. I don't know, but there has to be something like that.

[X] Doc CPU

What I was trying to do was to copy a file to a new one so that I could make changes to the copy, not the original. This is something I have been doing for more than 10 years so it cannot be assumed I did not know what I was doing. To my surprise, when I tried to open the copy in Gedit, it showed the archive (as the box icon of an archive) and asked if I wanted to extract there (in that directory). This is a directory containing less than a dozen files and in which I have been working for a month or so now, so I am very familiar with its contents.
I thought I had done something wrong and I tried again after deleting the archive but the result was the same.
When you try to edit files, the automatic backups are normally not accessible unless you specify the tilde (~) at the end of the file name.
I admit it is a very weird experience and if nobody else has had the same problem it is probably better we do not spend any more time on this, I will however return if I get the same problem again. If not, it was probably some odd behaviour that got cleared up with a reboot because I turn the machine off every day, I have occasional strange behaviour because of a faulty satellite internet modem I cannot get repaired but I have never thought it could create such bizarre situation. We'll see what happens.

It behaves normally now, I do not believe in the supranatural but this looks very much like one of its manifestation.

The strange behaviour I was talking about in my previous post never included crashes, just weird and bizarre things.

About 18 months ago, it was found on LQ my satellite modem has 2 internal addresses which do not communicate properly all the time creating connections with thousands of errors and a need to reboot sometimes, especially when the Internet connection is lost, which happens every day if I leave the machine on overnight. I should remember that faulty gadget when I have a problem like the one leading to my original post.

I do not think we can blame the quality of the laptop as it is an "Asus" which is renowned for the quality of its products.

Thank you all for your participation and reinforcing the fact this was not normal.