RestoreMeNot Disables Lion’s Resume For Individual Apps

One of Lion’s biggest changes for geeks and average OS X users alike has been its Resume functionality, which combined with Auto-Save ensures your documents are always saved in the background, and their application windows restored after you reboot your Mac, or quit an app. Whilst Lion’s window restoration may come in handy if you don’t want to lose your Safari browsing session or writing point in TextEdit, the opposite can also be true: automatic window restoration can be annoying for scratch documents that you don’t want to see again, in apps that perhaps you think should always start up fresh and uncluttered.

In our OS X Lion review, we detailed how it’s possible to decide to “quit and discard windows” every time by pressing the Option key alongside the usual CMD+Q combination – but wouldn’t it be nice to automatically disable window restoration forever in a specific app? In the days following Lion’s release, a number of Terminal hacks surfaced indicating that it was indeed possible to disable window restoration on an app-by-app basis. RestoreMeNot, a free System Preferences panel covered by Lifehacker earlier today, gives these Terminal hacks a graphical user interface that lets you choose apps you don’t want to restore windows with.

The app is extremely simple. Once installed, it’ll ask you for apps from your Finder. In my workflow, I always find myself hitting Command+Option+Q to quit and discard windows in Preview and OmniOutliner, so I might as well add them and go back to my usual Command+Q shortcut. RestoreMeNot does exactly this – it basically overrides the standard “Quit” command with “Quit and Discard Windows” and it’ll make sure your selected apps will launch window-free when possible (TextEdit, for instance, will create an “Untitled” document every time). Don’t worry though – this won’t disable auto-save: I tried with TextEdit, and whilst its windows wouldn’t be restored, the contents of a modified document were still correctly saved by Lion.

If you’re looking for a more advanced way to tweak your OS X Lion’s behavior, TinkerTool recently added an option to individually control Resume for apps as well. You can download RestoreMeNot for free here.