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.

Riding the Lion

Good news: Mac OS X 10.7.2 is out in the wild and it is wonderful.

FileVault 2 works and I must say that encryption in the background is very impressive.

The "scramble my icons" bug has disappeared, at least as far as I can see.

Beware of the Lion

OK, after a certain period of testing I have to renew my recommendation:

Do not upgrade to Mac OS X Lion
(unless a significant update is released)!

Lion is simply not ready for daily use. The reason I am saying this is mainly the “Lion won’t remember preferences” bug which also leads to the “The Finder in Lion won’t keep icons in their place” bug.

I suspect both symptoms are related to a bug in Lion’s new Autosave and Versions features. I don’t know and frankly I don’t care. Autosave and Versions are not too useful in the first place. But first and foremost a bug like not saving preferences is just unforgivable, and it continues to persist after the 10.7.1 update and there is no remedy in sight. I will try to stick to Lion because I already use full disk encryption (and even that does not work an all drives) and I am not willing to reformat. But it is not an easy task.

Update:
Mac OS X 10.7.2 seems to have removed the bugs mentioned.

Automatic Application Quitting in Lion (Is a Bad Thing)

Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) is a beautiful OS but, alas, features a new application quitting behaviour. Many apps will quit if no windows are open and the app is not the frontmost. That is definitely a change for the worse. Tidbits has a good article about this:

“Lion Is a Quitter”

Taming the Lion

My recommendation: Do not upgrade to Mac OS X 10.7 Lion prior to the release of a significant technical update.

Here is why:

• FileVault:

  The first thing Lion did to me was killing 3 of my accounts (data loss!), including the admin account for the machine. This happened during my attempt to turn on FileVault. On the first attempt I managed to turn FileVault on. But due to the loss of the admin account I had to do a clean install, requiring me to erase the whole disk and restoring all data from backup.

  After the clean install I was not able to turn FileVault on again. Every time I tried, the system would reboot twice and FileVault would remain turned off. The reason is somewhat unclear, but it seems that on startup the encrypted drive produces errors and will therefore be reverted to plain HFS+.

• Spotlight:

  Lion lost the Spotlight index and therefore tried to reindex the drive all the time so I could not search and it slowed down my machine.

  I reset the Spotlight index and now Spotlight works fine. (To reset the index I put the disk in the “privacy” [i.e. do not index] section in the Spotlight system preference panel for a short time.

• Time Machine

  I tried to use an encrypted backup. Unfortunately the backup disk failed to mount after a restart. I found that suspicious and checked the disk. Disk utility found severe, irreparable errors. I had to reformat the drive, this time with no encryption.

  However even on an unencrypted drive Time Machine seemed to be unusable because it was slower than the slowest snail. For example Time Machine told me that the remaining time for a full backup would be about 40 000 days.

  I decided to ignore these estimates and the full backup actually took much less time. Now Time Machine does its job normally.

  I suspect that if you interrupt the first backup Time Machine has to check all files backed up so far for changes. During this check almost no data is copied but Time Machine will calculate the remaining time based on data throughput during this check.

Well, now it seems everything is working fine except from FileVault 2 and encrypted backups. But it was a bit of a hassle. So my recommendation: wait for 10.7.1.

Addendum:
Thinking about it, all my troubles with Lion seem to be related to CoreStorage and encryption.

I have now running all my Macs under Lion. Everything works fine. Spotlight show its reindexing message occasionally, but all drives are actually searchable during the process. (Maybe it is a feature not a bug.) The Time Machine issue seems to have been just a miscalculation of the remaining time of the initial backup.

So I feel I have to restate my recommendation: Unless you want to use FileVault and encrypted backups it seems quite safe to upgrade. (Well, of course, if you use applications not compatible with Lion such as apps compiled for the PPC-architecture then you might not want to.) If you count on FileVault full disk encryption my recommendation is to wait with the upgrade or stick to legacy FileVault (FileVault 1 – user folder encryption). You can continue to use FileVault 1 under Lion, you have to activate it under Snow Leopard, though. So you can’t use it on a clean install system.

John Siracusa’s Lion Review

Like always John Siracusa has written an excellent review of the latest iteration of Mac OS X:

Mac OS X 10.7 Lion: the Ars Technica review

P.S.: Well, obviously I was a little hasty with my update, but of course I did do a backup before. ;)

The Sick Lion

I just tried to install Mac OS X Lion (10.7) on my Macbook. It was probably the worst installation I have ever experienced. Lion crashed and killed my admin user so I could only log in as a normal user with no rights. There is basically no way of a clean install unless you format the entire disk. The @«€&-?! installer has to be downloaded every @«€&-?! time which takes forever. It was more fun to install System 7 off floppy disks.

Update:
After having wiped my disk, I am no longer able to activate FileVault because the recovery partition has also been wiped and not been reinstalled by the Mac OS X Lion Installer. The whole process is so unbelievably stupid. Does anyone at Apple even have tested this? I am currently downloading the installer for the 4th time... Un-@«€&-?!-believable...

Update 2:
OK, it was not the recovery partition. It is there. But FileVault just does not work. I reinstalled the system. I reset the PRAM. I checked file system integrity. I checked and repaired (there were errors!) file permissions. All to no avail.

I must say this is one of the worst experiences I have ever, ever had with any Apple product.

These problems are probably related to FileVault. Apart from FileVault the clean install system seems to work just fine. But… I’ll stick with Snow Leopard until I get FileVault to work. And, frankly, I would like my money back. That’s why you should not run a .0-release if you want things to just work. Apple’s software is no exception here. I should have known better.