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

Yup! Already saw and saved the text to a file. Thanks! 🙂

Yeah, I showed that in my screen shots. Duplicate disappears from the menu, but Save As isn't added. Something I forgot to try though. Does Save change to Save As in Preview if you hold the Option key down when choosing from the menu? Can't test that at the moment. Working in Snow Leopard.

Kurt Lang wrote:

Does Save change to Save As in Preview if you hold the Option key down when choosing from the menu? Can't test that at the moment. Working in Snow Leopard.

It does.

Oh, sorry. Does it still do that if you've done the Terminal command to disable ApplePersistence? Or is Save As just plain gone?

Kurt Lang wrote:

Duplicate disappears from the menu, but Save As isn't added. Something I forgot to try though. Does Save change to Save As in Preview if you hold the Option key down when choosing from the menu?

No, but in Preview you can use the "Export..." menu item instead (works like Save As, only that the file you save doesn't automatically open in a new window, so you have to do that manually). This trick sadly doesn't work in iWork, though...

I'm very happy to say I don't use a single iLife or iWork app. I have the Adobe suite and other prepress software for that stuff.

I know this is a royal pain for a lot of folks who don't have an easy way to avoid this nonsense, but all I have to do is disable ApplePersistence for Preview so it doesn't save anything, and use the Snow Leopard version of TextEdit. Done.

Kurt Lang wrote:

I know this is a royal pain for a lot of folks who don't have an easy way to avoid this nonsense, but all I have to do is disable ApplePersistence for Preview so it doesn't save anything, and use the Snow Leopard version of TextEdit. Done.

Besides the TextEdit trick I mentioned earlier, theres's also TextEdit+, which is a fork of the latest version Apple makes (you still need to disable ApplePersistence though).

RonL wrote:

If you're experiencing slow opening apps or windows since upgrading to Mountain Lion... as I have...

I think the first thing to do in this case would be to investigate why this is happening. From all reports I have seen, Mountain Lion runs faster than Lion. Both have always run very fast on my systems.

and you don't want your OS to automatically save your TextEdit files, etc. then simply disable Autosave and Versions via Terminal.

Open Terminal and enter this command which will turn off Autosave & Versions globally:

defaults write -g ApplePersistence -bool no

Now reboot.

But if you don't want to mess around with terminal command that are not supported by Apple and that you will forget one day, you could just check this box:

This way, you get the best of all worlds:

1) You get autosave and versions if you want them

2) Your system behaves like Snow Leopard

3) You can easily change back at any time, without a reboot, and there is a record of what you did if you want to change your mind.

etresoft wrote:

RonL wrote:

If you're experiencing slow opening apps or windows since upgrading to Mountain Lion... as I have...

I think the first thing to do in this case would be to investigate why this is happening. From all reports I have seen, Mountain Lion runs faster than Lion. Both have always run very fast on my systems.

It is happening because of that setting, I observed it as well.

raftr wrote:

It is happening because of that setting, I observed it as well.

Then why don't I observe any slowness?

Just to make sure we're on the same page: the slowness is experienced on reboot, righ after typing the password in. Is it quick for you?

raftr wrote:

Just to make sure we're on the same page: the slowness is experienced on reboot, righ after typing the password in. Is it quick for you?

Reboot? I haven't rebooted for 12 days.

The Terminal changes don't take effect until you restart, or log out and log back in.

RonL wrote:

Open Terminal and enter this command which will turn off Autosave & Versions globally:

defaults write -g ApplePersistence -bool no

I agree that disabling ApplePersistence speeds up things quite a bit, but as I described in my tutorial, it's preferable to do this on a per-app basis instead of globally.