Thursday, May 17, 2012

How to disable Auto Quit under Lion

As mentioned before Mac OS X 10.7 Lion introduced a new feature called “Automatic Termination” or “Auto Quit” for short. It basically quits applications after their last window has been closed. (See this article on TidBits.)

IMHO Auto Quit is a major nuisance and probably the single worst feature ever introduced to the Mac OS. If I want to quit an app I can use the app menu, Cmd-Q or the Dock menu. Whereas normally closing a window does NOT mean that I don’t want to use the app anymore. It has always been a good Mac tradition that apps can run without any windows open so you can activate them quickly or even pass them commands via shortcuts.

That is particularly true for document based applications. Take TextEdit as an example. If I close all TextEdit windows and switch over to another app I may very well be wanting to switch back to TextEdit later to open or create another document. I also might want do to that using TextEdits Dock icon or the application switcher shortcut (Cmd-Tab). Auto Quit prevents all that by removing TextEdit’s icon from the dock and from the application switcher.

But auto quit is even bad for one window apps like iPhoto or Address Book. Quite often I work in some other app, say Word or Pages, but frequently want to switch back and forth to look up a photo or address. Auto Quit makes that very difficult. It forces me to lock the iPhoto or Address Book icons in the Dock and makes it that I have to always launch those apps again every time I want to look something up. It is almost as under Windows. So effectively Auto Quit is a multitasking preventer. It should not exist.

Now the good news: You can disable it. Yes!

Just open Terminal and type in the following command (and hit Enter):

defaults write -g NSDisableAutomaticTermination -bool yes

To make sure the command takes effect, you should probably log out and in again afterwards.

Enjoy! Your Mac will feel like it has been reborn.

My thanks go to user Lemmy Caution in the Apple discussion forums.

Addendum:
The setting does not work for Address Book and iPhoto, only for document based apps like TextEdit and Preview. So it is a great help but there is still room for improvement.