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Comment by iforgotpassword | Hacker News Reader

I haven't used Mac OS for a while

> macOS dialogs for closing an unsaved file have shifted from “Don’t Save, Cancel, Save” to “Delete, Cancel, Save.”

Does that mean if I write some essay, save it, then make some changes and close the application, it will ask this? This would imply like it would delete the whole file from disk instead of just discarding the changes I made since saving. I really hope I am wrong here and there is a different dialog for this case, otherwise this is just very horrible.

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The "Delete, Cancel, Save" is when you close a new document without having saved it. In your scenario, it's basically saving as it goes. The document will just close, without a dialog, but your changes will be saved.

macOS is trying to do away with the concept of "unsaved changes" altogether.

Thanks, that makes sense then for that dialog. Doesn't seem as bad as the author makes it out to be. But in general, I'm not really a fan of this implicit saving stuff, but maybe I'm just getting old and unable to adapt. :)

As a long-time Mac user (long enough to remember OpenDoc!) I massively dislike it. It’s becoming difficult to open a document without accidentally making some trivial change, which is then auto-saved. If the doc happens to be in Dropbox, you see the change notification and wonder, what did I do?? I just wanted to look at it!

The big problem is that it's very inconsistent across the OS. Only certain apps adhere to auto-saving (and thereby this modal).

This is strictly for the case where the file has never been saved, and doesn’t exist on disk.

Cancel always cancels the action, allowing you to continue working with it. Save saves, obviously. “Don’t Save” means “continue the user action, which was closing the window, which closes the unsaved file, deleting the contents in memory”. “Delete” does a better job of capturing the consequences of the action here.

> “Delete” does a better job of capturing the consequences of the action here.

Not for me. If I haven't explicitly saved my document, there is no copy to delete. "Don't save" (which I am more accustomed to after using Macs FOR THIRTY YEARS) is what I expect.

I believe the "delete" option is for a new file that has never been saved, the thinking being if you are going to leave an empty file by choosing "don't save", the better choice is to just delete the file ... I guess?

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