TUTORIAL: Disable Auto Save, Versions and bring back Save As

Please help! I'm still having an issue with TextEdit autosaving files. Here's what I did on Mountain Lion:

defaults write -app textedit ApplePersistence -bool no

and then

defaults write -app textedit AutosavingDelay -int 0

and then restart.

Now, take a Microsoft Wod doc with text in it and drag to TextEdit. Convert to plain text. Then watch as ML automatically saves this as a .txt file and completely removes the .doc file from your computer. You can't even undo to get back the original file.

Why do I care? I often receive Word docs from clients and need to open them in TextEdit to strip out all of the formatting so I can use for the web or within Adobe software. I had this functionality in Snow Leopard with no problems. And I need it back!

How can I fix this?

One of these should suffice:

Globally disable autosave:

defaults write -g ApplePersistence -bool no

Disable TextEdit's autosave:

Lock ~/Library/Saved Application State/com.apple.TextEdit/

http://osxdaily.com/2012/07/11/disable-auto-save-and-versions-in-mac-os-x/

Disable TextEdit's autosave:

Lock ~/Library/Saved Application State/com.apple.TextEdit/

http://osxdaily.com/2012/07/11/disable-auto-save-and-versions-in-mac-os-x/

Wish I had that folder to lock! Take a look:

Sorry, but now sandboxed apps in ML put it into ~/Library/Containers/. Lock that one:

~/Library/Containers/com.apple.TextEdit

These are the others:

com.apple.mail

com.apple.Notes

com.apple.Preview

com.apple.QuickTimePlayerX

com.apple.ShareKitHelper

Hi Greg,

I emailed you the instructions to remove Mountain Lion's version of TextEdit and replace it with Snow Leopard's. Much easier than trying to fool around with the OS's insistence of using Autosave/Versions.

"

defaults write -g ApplePersistence -bool no

Is there a way to have this set at boot?

After every reboot that stupid Versions seems to enable itself again.

thanks man ! its too bad that it doesnt work in iworks! thats where i need it the most !

i dont get it anymore , it seems that apple is determinded to dictate how

we work with our computers. And why ? It used to be different !

Apple used to be different! think different is over. think apple is the new

religion. think different is no longer allowed .

too bad and we need a new idea, a new company that is better than

windows and apple and allows us to be free.

erik

It's reasons like that why I still use Snow Leopard.

The way Apple's going, it's sure looking like they will be dead to me soon, or when my 17" MBP with Snow Leopard, 16 GB of RAM and an SSD dies.

It's a shame.

Twelve months on but nothing useful to add again. Why does it bother you if you don't even use Lion or Mountain Lion?

Thanks. Windows 8 has been built for people who cannot even handle Snow Leopard. Good luck.

Pete

And you took the time to reply just to gripe that I made a comment echoing the sentiments of the poster?

I was searching threads, came upon this and it echoed WHY I don't live in Mountain Lion. I only run it in emulation when I have to and need to develop in the latest version of Xcode. It's that bad.

Why is it that bad?

Here's why:

You see, there's a (many) reason(s) why I don't use ML as my main OS.

I do most of my work in 10.6.8 and only run the newer versions of the OS in emulation since too many features I relied on are removed and many introduced features are annoying and can't be turned off.

I was bitten by Lion and wasted many many many hours by making the mistake to upgrade to that. Then I was bitten by the upgrade to iTunes 11 and lost 6 THOUSAND podcasts due to a bug in the GUI.

I was also bitten by two upgrades in Xcode from 4.2 to 4.3 and 4.4 where Xcode upgraded the versioning of the storyboards without asking you, making the storyboards un-openable in 4.2.

I was also bitten by the upgrade from iOS 5 to iOS 5.1 where this prevented Xcode 4.2 from building to the device. And you can't revert it.

Apple's really screwed up the interfaces of the OS in the past two releases and many of the new "features" in the OSes I find usability regressions and useless crap flying across the screen that you have to spend valuable time learning how to turn off, or you simply can't turn off.

Based on how many times my productivity and time has been completely wasted by Apple updates since Lion was released, there is no way I am upgrading my working system without running the latest in emulation for a long time.

To date, we lost:

- The Finder's command control 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 sorting the list view by columns and toggling the sort order.

- The new Find command in the Finder since Lion is a royal pain to change from "contents" to "file name".

- Mountain Lion now makes EVERY NSOutlineView (folders in list view) animate the roll out of the expand/collapse of the content, making you wait to see the results.

- Safari's downloads window has been replaced with a stupid non-window thing and you can't display it at all if it's empty.

- Safari no has this distracting "flying icon" whenever you do a download and you can't turn it off.

- Mail has this irritating swoop up animation on send and you have to find out how to turn them off.

- All windows and dialogs now pop open in your face - which is creepy and you need to find out how to turn off.

- Auto save and auto restore is not always the most desirable option.

- copying large bundles of files now takes longer. Try copying Xcode and you'll wait 50% of the time with 0 bytes copied.

- Sandboxing and "Every app is an island". Kill me now. Just let me save my material where I WANT TO.

- Auto termination of apps is a complete farce - I WANT TO USE THE INTERFACE OF THE APP IF I CLOSE THE LAST DOCUMENT. THIS IS WHY THE INTERFACE EXISTS. And the app isn't really quit. Only the GUI is. The app is still running. On my 16 GB Mac, this saves me 5 MB of RAM and forces me to relaunch the app I just had open. This also implies that all apps are good citizens with respect to memory and all other apps.

- Safari still runs at full blast when in the background, forcing me to write my own methods to pause Safari or disable Javascript when in the background.

- iTunes 11 - the GUI looks like garbage and it's slower AND I lost 6 thousand podcasts and it's using Helvetica Neue? Is this a Mac app or an iOS app? This is nonstandard with the rest of the Mac experience and it looks like it was created by an art student in GIMP.

- The new trend of removing button background treatments on buttons in the tool bars simply make them look like graphics, not the buttons they are. This introduces doubt in the mind of the users. What's a button and what's a graphic? There is no visual difference. This is BAD.

- The skinny gray scroll bar thumbs are the width of a QUARTER on my 17" MacBook. And the graphics do not match the actual clickable area of the control! This introduces doubt in the mind of the user and inconstancy in the UI if the graphic for an item isn't the entire actual clickable area for that item.

- Running Mountain Lion on a modern (non SSD) MBP 13 is SLOWER than running Tiger on a MBP with 666MHz RAM. Safari launches in one bounce on the old Mac. I can not run ML on a machine without an SSD.

- Animations. Time consuming distracting animations EVERYWHERE. And we can't turn them off. I want a CRISP and FAST interface, not one where I have to watch every UI element reposition itself. Valuable developer TIME was put into this garbage. Can't we just have less animation and a fast system? Obviously not. But then I stick with Snow Leopard unless I need the latest Xcode, so, yes, yes I mostly can.

- command control D over text used to quickly display the dictionary definition for a word. Now, you have to wait and a little "pop open" animation appears when it used to be instant. Can you turn this off to get the window to display instantly as before? I don't know. I shouldn't have to spend the time to find out.

- Enabled button states all through the UI are now not near black, but mid gray of 115, while the disabled color is 161, making the visual identification of enabled buttons and disabled buttons much harder than the easily visually identifiable conventions in Snow Leopard.

You seem to be OK with the poor direction the OS has taken post Snow Leopard. I don't want my functional and productive OS to be diminished but it's happened and unless Apple hears this from users who have been with them since day 2, the OS and system we loved is only going to get worse.

Well Apple won't hear it from you here. You really should credit the article you copied from as well. You only post here for attention as this thread is over a year old, thus you attract the attention your moaning deserves. Either learn to use the modern OSXs or go back to Windows. No one will change the system for you and upset the many many millions of users who have no issues with it.

Good luck again

Oh and maybe tell Apple and not us?

Pete

I have. I emailed the list to Schiller and Jobs back in the Lion days and all it did was get me on some dysfunctional list. I've had calls from Apple discussing the issues. I've reported what I have the time to report to Apple, but honestly, I don't have the time to spend doing Apple's work for us. Like you, I have a day job and I don't get paid for reporting Apple's bugs to Apple. In fact, none of my reported bugs/issues have been addressed since I reported them. But honestly, many seem so obvious, I have little to no faith (or evidence) that they are going to get fixed simply by one person reportiong them. I had a previous life in QA well over a decade ago, and I know how long it takes to properly report bugs. It would be great if I had the time to do it and some indication that my issues would actually be fixed.

Oh, wait. I was wrong. The 6000 podcast deletion bug should have been fixed by now. But with all these issues, over two OS releases there is a larger question, "just how long until you simply don't want to use the OS at all any more"? I hope the situation changes and that question becomes meaningless, but what I've seen from the screenshots of the future on the Mac and iOS, it will be all too soon.

I hope I'm wrong.

Good luck then in the future of computing.

Pete

If it comes down to a case of making my money and getting out, then that is an option. We used the Mac OS because it offered us something that appealled to us. If that goes away, then it's simply no more fun to use and not productive enough to justify the aggrivation. Last time I checked, there were other options. It would be sad if those become better options, but I'm not going to stick with a set of platforms that become a chore to use.

That's not why we started using the Mac in the first place.

Alex Zavatone wrote:

If it comes down to a case of making my money and getting out, then that is an option. We used the Mac OS because it offered us something that appealled to us. If that goes away, then it's simply no more fun to use and not productive enough to justify the aggrivation. Last time I checked, there were other options. It would be sad if those become better options, but I'm not going to stick with a set of platforms that become a chore to use.

That's not why we started using the Mac in the first place.

That's your perogative, but stop annoying us with your little dislikes both here and in the 'Return Bounce' posts. As I said, many millions of others use it and their productivity has not seemed to have suffered, so perhaps it is just that 'you can't teach an old dog new tricks. We are coming up for the third OSX since Snow Leopard. Each becoming more popular than the last.

But as I say,

Good Luck