How To Bring Back “Save As” In OS X 10.7 Lion (Almost)

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I’m with Shawn Blanc. I miss “Save As” too.

I miss it so much, that since upgrading to Lion, I’ve stopped using TextEdit, and I switched to free rich text editor Bean instead – simply because it still supports the “Save As” command.

So where did “Save As” go? In a lot of Apple’s own apps, it’s been replaced by “Duplicate”. It’s all part of Lion’s autosave system, which saves versions of your file in the background while you work.

Duplicating can help you achieve the same thing as “Save As”, but it’s slightly more fiddly than it was before.

So if you also miss having a “Save As” command, what can you do about it? Here are a few options.

  1. You could do what Shawn Blanc did, and hack together some kind of keyboard macro that near-as-dammit replicates “Save As” – he used Keyboard Maestro to do it.
  2. Or you could map the traditional “Save As” keyboard shortcut – Command+Shift+A – to the “Duplicate” command. This doesn’t really change how things work, but might make Duplicate easier to use. Gruber’s tried this. I’ve tried it too, but didn’t find that it helped much.
  3. Another option is to do exactly as above, but remap the “Export…” command to the old “Save As” keyboard shortcut. This is slightly better, in that you get a save sheet right away and can type your new filename. OSX Daily has instructions for doing this. This is better, in my opinion, but frustratingly doesn’t work in TextEdit, which doesn’t have a plain “Export…” menu option (only “Export as PDF…”).
  4. You could try to re-wire your brain to do “Save As” in the Finder, by highlighting the file you want to save as something else, then hitting Command+D to create a duplicate of it there. The duplicate’s filename will be highlighted, ready for you to immediately rename it there. Quite frankly, this isn’t really any less fiddly than using Duplicate as Apple intended.

Of all of these, option 3 is probably my favorite, and I’ve used it with some success inside Preview. It hasn’t helped me get back to TextEdit, though – I’m still writing my rich texts inside Bean (and happily so, I might add).

Have you got any other “Save As” hacks or tips? Do you think we should all just stop fretting about it and accept Apple’s new way of doing things? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

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