MacOS – Disabling “modal sheets” in OS X

macoswindow-manager

In OS X, modal dialogues are displayed as "sheets" that drop down from the top of the window. In many cases this is nice, but occasionally I find it really annoying. Consequently, although it's a long shot, I thought I'd ask whether anyone knows a way to either disable these modal sheets entirely, or to detach a sheet so that it becomes a proper window.

The reason I want this is that I often have many (unsaved and untitled) documents open in TextEdit and other applications, with short notes that I've made. When I shut down my computer it asks me whether I want to save each of them, but if there's only a few lines of text then the modal sheet completely covers it, so I can't see what's in the document. This means I have to cancel the dialogue, which cancels the shutdown, then go though and manually save everything.

So although it's nice to have modal dialogues attached to the window they're associated with, I'd really appreciate a way to move them out of the way to see what's underneath, if one exists.

Best Answer

I highly doubt you can change the appearance of sheets, even through undocumented means – that's been a core part of OS X since 10.0.

That said, I think there's a way to effectively avoid the problem you're having: in System Preferences, go to General and uncheck the box for "Ask to keep changes when closing documents".

System Preferences → General → Ask to keep changes when closing documents

Now, apps that support auto-save (like TextEdit) won't bug you about unsaved changes when they quit – they'll simply save the changes in the background automatically, then restore them when you next launch the app.

^{(Note: I think the above option is only available on Mountain Lion).}

Related Solutions

MacOS – Non-modal dialog in full-screen Mail.app

You can use AppleScript to create a new message in a new, non-modal window, however, the window will be placed in one of your Desktop spaces, not in Mail's fullscreen space. You can save each of these as an application and access them through the Dock or the Script menu in the menu bar (enabled in AppleScript Editor's prefs).

New Message

tell application "Mail"
    make new outgoing message with properties {visible:true}
    activate
end tell

Reply to Sender

tell application "Mail"
    set theMessage to item 1 of (selection as list)
reply theMessage with opening window
    activate
end tell

Reply to All

tell application "Mail"
    set theMessage to item 1 of (selection as list)
    reply theMessage with opening window and reply to all
    activate
end tell

If you need to have the message viewer showing behind your message (e.g. to be able to copy something from an open email), then you can add the following lines to these scripts, immediately after the tell application "Mail" line:

set theMessage to selected messages of message viewer 1
set theMailBox to selected mailboxes of message viewer 1
set newViewer to make new message viewer
set selected mailboxes of newViewer to theMailBox
set selected messages of newViewer to theMessage
delay 1

This will create a new non-fullscreen mail viewer window, leaving the fullscreen window where it is. Then, after you send your message, you can simply close this new viewer.

Note: Depending on how quickly the new viewer opens, you may need to adjust the delay number. This delay (in seconds) allows the new viewer window enough time to finish opening before the script continues. If your machine is fast enough, you may be able to delete that line altogether.

MacOS – Disabling Command + Arrow scrolling

If your intention is to globally override this behaviour, this will do the trick:

Create a file called DefaultKeyBinding.dict and write on it the following:

    {
      "@\UF700" = "noop:";
      "@\UF701" = "noop:";
    }

@\UF700 is the Unicode value for Command+Up while @\UF701 is for Command+Down.

Save it and place it under ~/Library/KeyBindings/. If the folder doesn't exist, just create it.

A different approach would be to override this shortcuts on each of the Applications you're having troubles with, assigning the problematic shortcuts to the Application's function you usually don't use, for instance.

Best Answer

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MacOS – Non-modal dialog in full-screen Mail.app

MacOS – Disabling Command + Arrow scrolling

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