The interactive versions of Quickload and Quicksave are available only by using hotkeys The key combinations are shown here in the Help menu.
Quicksave saves the current solution (or pose) to a numbered quicksave slot. As the name implies, it's a quick alternative to using Save Solution dialog to create a named save.
Used interactively, hotkeys allow Quicksave to save to slots 1 to 8.
The hotkeys for Quicksave are Ctrl+Shift+1, Ctrl+Shift+2, and so on through Ctrl+Shift+8, saving to slots 1 to 8.
Recipes can use save.Quicksave to save to slots 1 to 99.
While there aren't hotkeys for working with quicksave slots 9 through 99, the contents of these slots are still available after a recipe ends. Players can load these slots via the Open/Share Solutions dialog with "Show auto and quick saves" checked. The recipe Slot Grabber 1.0 also allows loading from slots 9 to 99.
The remix tool makes use of quicksave slots when used manually. The remix tool provides a list of results which can be reviewed to see how they change the protein. Promising poses can be selected. The selected poses are saved in quicksave slots when the player closes the remix tool.
Recipe use of quicksaves
Many recipes use quicksaves as their primary means to testing new solutions. In a recipe, quicksave slots 1 through 99 are available.
Recipes also have another mechanism called Recent Best. The recent best pose is based on score, and is automatically updated as the protein changes. A recipe can set the current pose as being the recent best. Then, after applying a series of changes (shakes, wiggles, and so on), the recipe can "restore" the recent best. If the changes improved the score, "restore recent best" has no effect, otherwise it sets the protein to the last "set recent best" pose. Set Recent Best and Restore Recent Best commands are also available for interactive play.
Some recipes use a combination of quicksaves and "recent best" to maintain the best pose. The advantage of using the recent best pose is that the restore function implicitly compares the score of the poses. Using quicksave slots, the recipe must do its own score checking.
Quicksave functions
In the Foldit Lua interface, the function save.Quicksave saves the current pose to a specified quicksave slot. The function save.Quickload loads a pose from the specified slot. The function save.QuicksaveEmpty returns an indication of whether a slot already contains a saved pose.
Recent best functions
The recent best pose can be set using the function recentbest.Save and restored using recentbest.Restore.