By John Gruber
Nylas is an API for email, calendar, and contacts.
Matt Gemmell on the new keyboard shortcut for the “Don’t Save” button in the standard sheet that appears when you close a document with unsaved changes — it used to be Command-D, but now it’s Command-Delete:
Since the user will probably associate Command-S with saving (it triggers the Save menu command, after all), it makes sense to also assign that shortcut to the Save button within the sheet. However, that creates a problem: the previously-standard Command-D shortcut for “Don’t Save” puts two opposing commands on adjacent keys (since S and D are adjacent on a QWERTY keyboard).
It would be unacceptable to invite the inevitable physical slips this would case, so “Don’t Save” is now triggered by Command-Backspace (which is an excellent shortcut, since not saving means your document’s contents will be deleted, in a sense, and hitting Command-Backspace is slightly more difficult than hitting Command-D).
He’s right that Command-Delete is safer for a destructive shortcut, but there’s another reason for the change. In previous versions of Mac OS X, choosing Save in this sheet would then open a second sheet, the standard Save dialog box. In Lion, this confirmation sheet has been combined with the Save dialog box. And in the standard Save sheet, the shortcut Command-D has always been a shortcut for changing the Save destination to your desktop. That’s still the case. So it’s not that Command-D no longer works in this sheet, it’s that it now means “change the location to the desktop”.
★ Thursday, 21 July 2011