Speed up your OS... turn Autosave & Versions off globally

Yes, I did restart it.

I removed the "shortcut" trick that swapped "save as" with "duplicate" and tried your Terminal command again, then restarted.

It behaves the same way again, there is still that error message.

Sorry, I have no suggestions for that. I'm not seeing any error messages.

I restarted again… and I got the prompt as well.

Possibly the system is confused where to put Save As or Duplicate, or how to invoke them when you do both the shortcut change and the Terminal command? I used only the Terminal command to turn off Autosave/Duplicate. The above is how the menus changed on their own.

This is why I now tried to do the Terminal command on its own, without the amended shortcuts, with the same result.

Correct. It's easily lost between the screen shots, but I noted it above for Preview:

the default button to cancel is "Revert to Saved". After the command, it becomes the older style "Don't Save".

For anyone who uses Xcode, watch out! Autosave will save your scripts when you don't want them saved, whether you are in the middle of coding or if your cat walked on the keyboard (which mine loves to do). The result is a crashed script with no warning, and if you quit Xcode you have no cmd-z upon reopening the script to fix it. This has ruined my Xcode experience. A argued with Apple about the problem but they are adamant it should be normal behavior.

I now see the message after following your outline. I too had been saving without adding any unsaved changes. TextEdit will just sit there forever if you've saved. If you don't, you get this message after about 30 seconds:

Which is a bunch of hooey since the file is on my desktop and I can save it anytime I want. It will certainly throw people off though when it keeps reappearing if you haven't saved.

Which for me, just goes back to the previous solution. Delete Mountain Lion's version of TextEdit from the drive and use the one from Snow Leopard.

they are adamant it should be normal behavior.

*Sigh* The same arrogant attitude they've been stuck on since Lion. Somebody there thinks they know better than you what to do with, and when to save YOUR data. Does Apple really not understand that my desktop computer is a workstation and not an iPad? I am plenty capable of deciding when my files need to be saved. Stop trying to make that decision for me!

There really needs to be an official way to turn Autosave off.

AFAIK, the only way to disable Autosave is to lock the Saved Application State folder. There's no way to turn off Versions. Do not go down the road of deleting or locking the DocumentRevisions-V100 folder. The only thing you can do with Versions is to avoid using Apps that have it enabled.

AFAIK, the only way to disable Autosave is to lock the Saved Application State folder.

That's a start at least, and easy to do.

Kurt Lang wrote:

I now see the message after following your outline. I too had been saving without adding any unsaved changes. TextEdit will just sit there forever if you've saved. If you don't, you get this message after about 30 seconds:

This is an error related to the (Mountain) Lion sandbox (and only happens in TextEdit; all other apps works fine).

Fortunately, there's a workaround. The following Terminal command will stop these error messages from showing up in the future:

defaults write -app textedit AutosavingDelay -int 0

This effectively disables the classic/real/pre-Lion/TextEdit-only autosaving mechanism, which is what the sandbox has problems with.

P.S. I just posted a tutorial about how to disable Auto Save and Versions. It can be found here: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4166543?tstart=0

I just noted that the solution described in this thread does not affect Numbers at all. It's Autosave as usual. Seemingly, the same with Preview.