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Comment by Grombobulous | Hacker News Reader

I’ve always loved how TextEdit’s “don’t save” button is actually a red button that says “delete” for unsaved text files.

There’s no ambiguity there. The user is very well-informed that they’re about to quit and lose the document they were working on.

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The example of Pages from the article has actually since been changed to do the same thing.

Red "Delete" on the far left, then on the far right a gray/neutral "Cancel" button, and an orange (the app's primary color) "Save"

"Delete" is the wrong verb, suggests I'm deleting the file, which I'm not. Sure you could say, well you're deleting the unsaved changes, but this isn't what it means on any other computer or even in other Mac apps.

The same update (Lion?) ruined saving overall. Apple has insisted that apps should never have a "save as." You can hold opt to do it anyway, but it silently overwrites the original too. Maybe or maybe not lets me revert, and idk where even those revisions are stored. Apple might've hoped this catches on, but again nothing else does it this way. I get they want me to duplicate the file first, but no, I already made changes that I want to save-as, it's too late to duplicate.

If they were going for blurring the line between memory and disk, that didn't work either because there is still the concept of saved vs unsaved changes (that can get "deleted"). It's not like Google Docs.

You are deleting the document from your computer.

In some instances this could be a file on disk. But it does not have to be.

It's not deleted. I already have a.txt. I edit it then quit without saving. a.txt is still there.

Since 10.7 it autosaves.

The Delete button is shown, and correct, for new files that have not been saved at all yet.

Oh you're right. And if I enable "ask to keep changes when closing documents," it asks me if I want to "revert changes" when I quit, not "delete." That even survives a force-quit, so on-disk the file was autosaved, but it still remembers that the changes are in an uncommitted state.

Weird thing is with the setting disabled, quitting TextEdit with multiple new docs open asks if I want to "delete and quit," but Numbers only lets me "save and quit." Even if I press that, Numbers reopens those in a still-uncommitted state. So from all the CSVs I've opened in Numbers and messed with, I have literally 100 pending docs and can only get rid of them by clicking through every single one.

A better verb would be "Discard"

Yes exactly. Which I think is sometimes said.

I think you’re technically correct but that “delete” gets the right thought across to someone who doesn’t understand how files work. You’re deleting whatever you have in front of you.

I agree about Save As…

Maybe that could have just been updated to “Save a Copy” or something like that. I don’t really understand why it’s a hidden option.

If common users understand it then fine, but it doesn't seem like they do. Only Apple does it this way.

On the subject of being slightly too pedantic for my own good, using "disk" in a conversation sort of worries me, It does not really matter, everyone knows what you are talking about, but it is not often an actual disk anymore. Is "storage" fine as a replacement? as in, memory vs storage.

I could go full nerd and call it "non-volatile storage" but nobody wants that.

A power user who’s aware they didn’t save would be confused, as there isn’t any file to delete. I would prefer “Discard”, which would also be applicable to the case of not saving changes to an existing file, where “Delete” would be entirely inappropriate.

… but, a power power user would know that it was transparently saved every several keystrokes, even while named Untitled and ostensibly unsaved, ready for immediate transparent recovery on relaunch, after an app or system crash -- so they might again be okay with it.

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