A Hack to Get Back ‘Save As’

Shawn Blanc:

A common workflow for me was to open a previously saved document and use it as my template for a new document. I would make changes to it and then save it as a new document. To Save As meant you took the document you were working on and saved it as a new document in its current state while discarding those changes from the original and leaving that original document as it was. I used Save As all the time.

But in Lion, the ability to Save As is gone. Sadly, Command+Shift+S gets you nothing.

In place of “Save As”, we now have “Duplicate”.

His solution is a Keyboard Maestro macro that replicates the behavior of Save As. I’ve been irritated by the new Duplicate thing, but I can’t tell if it’s because I actually prefer the old Save As workflow or simply that the new Duplicate workflow is going to take some time to get used to. I suspect it’s the latter, so I’m sticking with it for now.

Update: Good point from David Chartier: perhaps the biggest problem with Duplicate is that Apple didn’t give it a standard keyboard shortcut. I’m going to assign Duplicate the old Shift-Command-S shortcut, and see if that helps.

★ Tuesday, 29 November 2011