Turn off autosave in Apple applications

Autosave/Versions has been part of OS X since Lion. See these instructions. Save As will be back in its normal position in all apps, and when you close documents, you will be asked if you want to Revert (same result as the old Don't Save).

Versions and Autosave will still be running in the background for those apps that use it. You can't really turn it off without disrupting some application menus, but this at least makes OS X behave more like Snow Leopard and earlier.

I didn't know that "Ask to keep changes when closing documents" affected Autosave.

Lion was loved by many, and equally hated by at least as many. Apple was deluged with users who demanded a way to turn Autosave/Versions off and bring back Save As instead of the confounding Duplicate to the OS and its apps.

When you turn that check box on, Autosave is still doing its thing in the background for the apps that use it (mostly Apple's), but causes a major difference in the result of closing a file. Without it (and doesn't even exist in Lion), when you close for example, a TextEdit file, it is saved with those changes whether you wanted it to or not, and it doesn't even ask.

The most frustrating part was/is the way Duplicate works. As you know, when you do a Save As in Snow Leopard or earlier, that new file takes on all of the changes you may have made up to that point. You close the original, and none of the changes are saved to that document, unless at some point, you intentionally pressed Command+S to save changes while you were working on it. That's what people were used to and what they expect Save As to do. Now do the same thing in Duplicate. Make a bunch of changes without saving and create a duplicate. Close the original. What happened? Your original just got saved with all of the changes you've made, making the whole point of branching the changes off to a new file moot. You now have two identical files instead of your original and only the duplicate with the changes.

Turning the check box on stops this behavior, even though Autosave is still doing what it does in the background. When you close the original, the OS asks if you want to Revert Changes - Cancel - Save, instead of simply closing the file with the same changes and not even asking what you want to do.

I meant only that the checkbox comment doesn't mention any affects on Autosave. I do know about Autosave and Duplicates and Apple's idiotic attempt at document versioning.

Ah! Gotcha.

Document creation preference: Versioning - Always Ask Me Never

Many, many users asked for just such a change in the System Preferences during Lion's time. Don't remove it as many user do like the feature, but give users the option to turn it off. Still can't actually turn it off. Your layout is excellent and is one way it should have been implemented to start with.

But, that was the whole dog and pony show for Lion's release. The big announcement for it was, "Never have to save your files again!". That, and an obvious attempt to make OS X's interface mimic the iPad / iPhone so they'd have a consistent looking interface and behavior (save your files for you, launch all apps and documents you were using when you last shut down so it kind of behaves the same as an iPad). Like Windows 8, trying to put a tablet interface onto a desktop computer just plain didn't work. At least not for me, and many other users. A lot of the changes introduced in Mountain Lion were specifically to turn most of that behavior off.

Autosave/Versions is essentially never running on my Mac by way of never using any productivity apps written by Apple. Even TextEdit gets deleted from my Mac and the Snow Leopard version is placed in my user account. So no versioning or autosaving happens with TextEdit, either. Preview is the only one I use that does, and only occasionally to quickly look at an image (JPEG, TIFF or similar). If I do happen to change anything, I then just don't allow it to save the file (Revert Changes).