Can't disable autosave Follow

Mentioned settings just disable files saving on losing focus. Auto-save is a core IDE feature that can't be disabled completely. Auto-save can happen at multiple stages: e.g. making changes in Settings, running command in Terminal, executing/debugging scripts etc.

But normally saving doesn't occur immediately on each change. Does the problem affect all files, or some certain ones only? Do you have debug session active?

Yes, I do have an active debug session as I'm working on express app. Disabling debug session disabled the auto save as well, thanks for pointing that out. Is there a way to keep debugger active but disable autosave?

Yes - try disabling Live Edit plugin. Related ticket: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/WEB-7093

Disabling the Live Edit plugin fixed the problem. Thanks!

I'm currently using Webstorm 2017.2.4 and regardless of what configuration I have in Settings -> Synchronization, Webstorm saves every keystroke. Live Edit plugin disabled, no file watchers, no debugging, nothing.

I have several watchers running in my terminal and they keep firing every single key stroke because of Webstorm, slowing down my machine.

The only way I can disable this is by enabling the power save mode, which also disables all inspections and I don't want that. There is literally nothing special in my environment, all I'd like is that the configurations I set in Settings -> Synchronization work as I set them. Regardless of the power save mode flag.

Please, check this answer: http://stackoverflow.com/a/7377886.

Also feel free to vote and comment this request: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEABKL-6460.

Do you have any custom plugins installed? They can also be responsible for auto-saving -,for example, Flow service, when enabled, flashes files to disk to submit up-to-date files to Flow type checker, third-party SonarLint and ESLint plugins are known for causing such issues, as they save files to run analysis on the changes, etc.

Here I am in late 2017 and this is still an issue. Disabling LiveEdit plugin completely was the only thing that stopped my LESS/CSS files being written to disk on every keystroke. I have no file watchers in Webstorm (only Grunt running externally) and all auto-save and auto-syncronize features were already turned off.

Looking at https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/WEB-7093 this has been an issue since at least 2013. 

This is unacceptable! Why is this still an issue? I just started using IntelliJ recently. This is a showstopper.

What issue? Auto-saving by Live Edit is not a bug, Live Edit has to auto-save files in order to provide live reload. But this only happens during JavaScript Debug session, and is not an issue if Live Edit is disabled

My comment is in general with auto-save and its use in JetBrain products (IntelliJ / PyCharm). You can disable some auto-save "features" such as "saving after n minutes" or "save files on frame deactivation". For me, the showstopper is auto-save when exiting the program. No place to disable this. I could care less on someones use case for this feature; however, it is not a feature I find useful. In fact, it can be outright dangerous. There is no place to disable this. This was a very short honeymoon. After 4 hours of frustration, it's back to Eclipse. 

My issue is that I am debugging my Typescript React app in Chrome, and React/TS would recompile every time I typed, which resulted in a lot of React/Chrome hot-reloading and slowing Webstorm down.

I found the magic button, though! Preferences > Build, Execution, Deployment > Live Edit. Uncheck "Update application in Chrome" and Chrome won't get updated/reloaded by Webstorm. Your React server will still perform your hot-reaload only when you actually hit save.

If you're watching in several terminals and that's slowing you down then this won't help, but this made a huge difference for me.