what happened to "save as"?

On Mountain Lion, it's hidden. Open File menu and hold Option key to see Save As on the menu

It's not a bug. What app are you using?

Only Apple knows ;-)

Many users calling Apple directly, and posts on various web sites finally convinced Apple to return Save As. As you noticed though, it's not in the same place it held for over two decades. In particular, not for those programs written by Apple. It is possible to get Save As… back to its long time keystroke by following the steps below.

Step one: Open the System Preferences and click on the General tab. By default, two options are off. Turn on the check boxes for Ask to keep changes when closing documents, and Close windows when quitting an application.

The first is particularly important to Save As since you do not want Autosave/Versions saving anything without your consent. If you don't check the first box, your original document will receive the same changes as your Save As document, defeating the entire purpose of not having your original assume all of the same changes. The second isn't necessary to Save As, but if you're like me, you also have no desire for your desktop Mac to behave like an iPad, which restores all apps back to their last state whether you want it to or not.

Step two: Related to the Close windows when quitting an application check box is reopening windows when logging back in. Again, it's an iPad like behavior, which many desktop users also didn't like. Select and Restart or Shut Down from the Apple menu and uncheck the box for Reopen windows when logging back in.

Your Mac will now work like any Mac before Lion, 10.7. Apps will not launch themselves and program windows will not restore themselves on a restart or power on.

Step three: Back to Save As. Open the System Preferences and click on Keyboard. Choose Application Shortcuts in the left column. By default, the only item there is Show Help menu. You're going to add a new one. Click the + button, type Save As and stop. Be sure to capitalize each word.

Three periods does not work here, you must enter a true ellipses. On a U.S. keyboard, that's Option+; (Option key plus the semi-colon). Where it asks what keystroke you want assigned to your new entry, press Command+Shift+S. Click the Add button and close the System Preferences. Your screen should look like the image below.

Close any applications you may have had open and relaunch them. Save As… will now replace Duplicate in all menus where Command+Shift+S would be. Duplicate will remain in your menus, but now has no keystroke (on the desktop, Command+D will be Duplicate). Save As will also work as you've always used it. After saving your document with a new name, you can close the original and it will do so without asking if your want to save your changes to the original. Even better, the original closes without any of the changes applied to it. And by having the check box on for Ask to keep changes when closing documents, you can close a document that has changes without Autosave/Versions saving those changes without asking. You will instead get a choice of Revert Changes, which will have the same effect as the old Don't Save.

If you search around, you'll find Terminal commands to completely disable Autosave/Versions globally. Don't do that. If you do, then even with the above changes, Save As… will disappear from Preview. The only commands in the menu to save any file will be Save or Export. The Terminal command doesn't affect TextEdit the same way, Save As… stays in the menu. I don't have any of the iLife or iWork apps, so I don't know how it would affect those. From those reporting who have tried these steps, Save As… returns to Command+Shift+S. It doesn't matter that Autosave/Versions is active at this point. With the changes above, your Mac will essentially behave like OS X in Snow Leopard or earlier. Not that Autosave/Versions working in the background still won't slow your system down when working with large files, but at this time, you can't have it both ways.

Kurt, thanks. Just realized on this IMAC I'm still running Lion! I've got ML on my macbook pro and my wife's IMAC. Realized it after starting to do the first thing you suggested when I couldn't find those boxes. If it would work best for me to update to ML, I'll do that and start again or if you've got any suggestions on how to do the same with Lion I would appreciates. Sorry for my oversight but very much appreciate the help!

It can't be done in Lion, so upgrading your Mac to ML would be a good move. Other than a bit of time, it won't cost you anything, either. 🙂

Just started. Not sure why I hadn't done so sooner. Very much appreciate your help. 🙂 Was beginning to panic on how to get these files to a size I could email!

The earlier version of Preview also had a "Save All" command in the menu.

I tried to add this using the same method you outlined for "Save As..." but it didn't take. I was using the keystrokes that were used in the earlier version of Preview for "Save All" being Option+Command+S.

What am I missing here?

Apple changed Preview quite a bit in Mountain Lion. The Save All option may simply be gone.

I agree with the above EXACTLY. The iPad is great, but I got it for reading and consuming data. I don't know what ever possessed them to think I wanted to degrade my laptop into a $1500 iPad.

With a LOT of study, I've got it down down to where its' ALMOST tolarable. (I haven't found a way to bring back the scroll arrows -- and if anyone wants to write even rough hack to bring them back, I'll take it.)

The easist way to bring back 'save as' is just hit option every time. A pain, but... It's workable.

The easiest way to stop the infernal relaunching of programs after a restart is set your desktop the way you wanted it (for me that was no windows open) then lock the preference file: com.apple.loginwindow.[long random number here].plist Now on shutdown it can't save whatever is open. That pref is in the 'by host' folder.

And finally, to keep it from opening whatever doodle you had open last every time you open a program, throw away everything in the folder: ~/User/Library/Saved Application State then lock the folder. Now as you save programs it can't save their states.

Why there aren't just simple, working off switches for all this, god only knows, but the above works.

Kurt,

Thanks for thw writeup. I'm now migrating form SL to ML, and the amount of conflicting info & tips on the web is staggering.

Kurt Lang wrote:

Save As will also work as you've always used it. After saving your document with a new name, you can close the original and it will do so without asking if your want to save your changes to the original. Even better, the original closes without any of the changes applied to it.

Interestingly, however, after making the above changes, what's happening in my case, at least in TextEdit:

-- The "final" original (the one that'll get opened if the original is re-opened) does indeed show up without the unsaved changes, as desired;

-- However, if I use the "Revert" menu item to look at all the versions available of the eoriginal, an addiitonal version with the unsaved changes is also available, with a timestamp a couple of minutes before that of the final.

I'm curious if others are seeing this as well.

More generally, I find the whole issue exasperating. What I'd really like is versioning, but without automatic autosave.

For the graybeards in the audience, VMS had this 25 years ago. It was a simple mechanism, and very simple to use & understand, see

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Versioning_file_system#Files-11_.28RSX-11_and_OpenV MS.29

A user could specify how many versions were kept by default, and als ofine tune that on a per-folder and/or file-type basis.

-- However, if I use the "Revert" menu item to look at all the versions available of the original, an additional version with the unsaved changes is also available, with a timestamp a couple of minutes before that of the final.

Any type of master of understanding exactly what Versions does I am not. 😉 From the timestamp, it sounds like it's saving the opening state of the file as another state where it closed the file without saving the changes as the current state. (Say that ten times real fast). Sorry, can't think of a less confusing way to word it.

I'd like to just kill Autosave/Versions completely, but as mentioned above, if you do that, then the menu commands get screwed up.

Kurt Lang wrote:

I'd like to just kill Autosave/Versions completely, but as mentioned above, if you do that, then the menu commands get screwed up.

I've not seen the screw ups. See http://osxdaily.com/2012/07/11/disable-auto-save-and-versions-in-mac-os-x/ for examples.