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

you can just hit the space bar too.

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.

Damn, space bar. Doh!

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.

In other news, this captcha sucks.

Great, this one has been eluding me for ages, I'm glad I've found a solution.

Great tip! I've been using a Mac for about twi years now and this shortcut has always eluded me, thanks for sharing!