OS X: The Keyboard Shortcut for “Don’t Save”

By Daniel Miessler on March 25th, 2008: Tagged as Apple | OS X | Productivity

If you’re an efficiency/productivity nut like I am you are probably also obsessed with keyboard shortcuts. One of the main ones for me is the ability to close documents in OS X without saving them.

So, given the dialog above, how do you select “Don’t Save” without using your mouse? You can’t use the arrow keys, and you can’t use the tab key. It was annoying me, so I looked it up.

Turns out it’s simple enough: ⌘-D — for “Don’t Save”. :)

[ Edit: Evidently you can also just hit the spacebar if you have full keyboard access turned on. Thanks Jon. ]

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Jon Robinson 9 months ago 1 point
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you can just hit the space bar too.

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Jon Robinson 9 months ago 1 point
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i should clarify....since you have it turned on in the prefs that you have keyboard access to this menu (I can tell because of the highlighted blue shadow behind the Don't save button), you can tab that highlighted blue outline and to select the highlighted button you press the spacebar.

This drove me nuts when I switched to OSX a year ago so I hunted the trick down. That and not being able to alt+tab between windows of the same program. You can alt+~ instead. I'm still not used to that.

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Daniel Miessler 9 months ago 1 point
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Damn, space bar. Doh!

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Tim F. 9 months ago 1 point
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Yeah, when I made the switch to Mac I was greatly annoyed by the fact that tab would only switch between text fields, so I hunted down the option under the Keyboard/Mouse section of System Preferences that allows me to select all form field types using tab.

It still needs work, though. Whenever a window pops up with several options the first field is outlined, and it's rarely what I actually want to do.

Take, for instance, closing out of firefox when you have multiple tabs open. You have 3 fields, the first of which is a checkbox (warn me in the future when closing multiple tabs) and is highlighted. The second field is the "close tabs" button, and the third option is the cancel button, which is highlighted. If I hit enter, firefox stays open, and if I hit space it merely unchecks the box. In order to do what I want to do 90 percent of the time, I either have to hit tab then space or I have to move over to my mouse. That's unacceptable. In windows, the default choice (highlighted and outlined) is "Close tabs", so I can hit Alt+F4 and then hit enter or space.

I have the same problem with the "remember this password?" pop-up. Maybe it's just firefox that's messed up.

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Tim F. 9 months ago 1 point
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In other news, this captcha sucks.

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