Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Get Save As back on Mountain Lion's File menu easily and without hacks

Get Save As back on Mountain Lion's File menu easily and without hacks:

Much rejoicing accompanied the news that Mountain Lion brought back the "Save As..." option (which had been taken away in Lion and replaced with the not-nearly-the-same-thing "Duplicate" command). Unfortunately, Save As was relegated to a sub-menu which could only be seen if you held down the Option key, or you could use the not-very-convenient keyboard shortcut Command+Shift+Option+S.
For some reason, that keyboard shortcut never worked for me, so I decided to remap it using System Preferences.
Since I am never, ever, ever going to use the "Duplicate" item, I decided that I would remap "Duplicate" to something else, and restore Command+Shift+S back to its rightful spot as "Save As..."
I went to System Preferences » Keyboard » Keyboard Shortcuts and selected "All Applications" on the right side. Then I clicked the plus-sign under the right column and added "Duplicate" for "All Applications" to be the keyboard shortcut Command+Shift+Option+D (aka "I am never going to use this shortcut and don't want to press it accidentally").
Then I did the exact same thing, except this time I used "Save As..." for the menu. Note that both "Save" and "As" must be capitalized, and you must use a proper ellipsis character at the end. On a Mac with the US-English keyboard, you can get this by holding down the Option key and typing a semi-colon.
Voilà! This will now work in every Mac application which has a Duplicate and/or Save As... menu. If an app does not have one of those menus, it will just ignore the keyboard assignment. You could also assign this for specific apps if you only want to use it in certain apps.
An unexpected but very pleasant side effect of making this change is that OS X makes the "Save As..." menu item visible again even without holding down the Option key.
Before (no Save As... visible):

After (welcome back old friend!):

Quite frankly, I think I would have paid $20 for this alone.
If you don't mind Apple's suggested keyboard shortcut for Save As... but would like it to show up on the menus, all you have to do is rename the Duplicate menu item (as described above). Once that was renamed, the "Save As..." menu item appeared. I only added the custom keyboard shortcut for that because I wanted it to respond to Command+Shift+S as it had always done before Lion.
Update: Great tip from 'rbascuas' in the comments: if you remap "Duplicate" to "Shift+Command+Option+S" then "Duplicate" will be hidden (until you hold down the Option key) and "Save As..." will still be shown. That is even better because then I don't even have to see the Duplicate command, unless I want to use it, which I never will.
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