As I pointed out in a previous tip, it’s pretty great to be able to dismiss “Save As” boxes without having to use your mouse. But in Lion, the Apple lunkheads broke the Command-D shortcut to select “Don’t Save.” I could write an angry letter or picket the Cupertino campus, but instead, I’m writing about the new shortcut that they changed it to. That’s much healthier, don’t you think?
When you hit Command-W to close an unsaved document’s window (or click on the red “stoplight” button at the upper-left of the window), you’ll of course be asked if you’d like to save.
In Snow Leopard, you could choose “Don’t Save” from the keyboard by hitting Command-D. For Lion, the shortcut is now Command-Delete. You’re done. You don’t have to learn a darn thing more. Whew.
Remember, though, that programs compatible with Auto Save in Lion will only show the dialog box above if you haven’t already saved your document. If the file you’re working on has been saved somewhere, you can close its window any time you’d like without having to deal with any nonsense.
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Just upgraded to Lion and am missing the Save As menu command :(
Thanks for the info. I’ve started a list of things to reconfigure and/or relearn when I finally install Lion and I’ll add this to it.
Have you found any kind of reason for this change or do they just hate power users? (<- bitterness)
Sorry to nitpick but it’s command-backspace…
And on a Mac the “baskspace” key is labeled “delete” as most Mac keyboards don’t have a “forward delete” key. However, I appreciate the clarification since in my mind’s eye I had pictured hitting the forward delete key when I read “Command-Delete”. Perhaps if I’d been sitting at my Mac instead of at a PC at work I wouldn’t have grasped the correct meaning sooner.
Hi skipaq,
Don’t stress?that’s by design. I wrote a really long tip on Auto Save in Lion a while back, and maybe that’ll help you. I’m kind of sad that “Save As” is gone, too, to be honest.
?Melissa
I really have no idea. My best guess is that it’s for consistency (Command-Delete being the shortcut for “Send to Trash,” as well). Who knows? Maybe the moon was in the seventh house or Jupiter was aligned with Mars.
Hi Emerik,
As ilikeimac pointed out, Mac keyboards these days don’t have a “backspace” key. But I do appreciate you pointing that out!
?Melissa
Thanks for pointing me back to that article. It will be helpful I think; but I still will miss “Save as.” One thing I do every week is put out a bulletin. It was so easy to pull up the last one, change the date and any other data plus paste the new article over the old one. Rename with “Save as” and all was done. Time to retrain after 25 years. :(
You can still do that. “Save as…” is now “Duplicate”. In fact, if the document is older, any modification to the file will bring up a dialog asking if you want to duplicate it. That way you don’t even need to worry about the lack of the shift-cmd-s shortcut. (And if it’s not old enough, you can manually “lock” the file from the arrow button next to the window’s title.)
Thanks for the thoughts, webjprgm! I use “Duplicate” for that function, too, but I miss “Save As” still. I’m trying to come to terms with it using a 12-step program.
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