One of Lion’s cool new features is Resume and a number of Apple’s applications support this feature. Many other developers are hard at work adding the Resume feature to their applications. Resume automatically reopens every window you had open when you last quit the application. For many applications like Safari this is a tremendous time saver and for those applications that you rarely need to reopen the same documents, it maybe be a nuisance.

If you prefer Lion not to reopen all the current open windows on relaunch then hold down the option key and the “Quit” menu item changes to “Quit and Close All Windows” or you can press Commnad-Option-Quit.

There is a terminal trick that will permanently prevent Lions Resume feature in any application that supports this feature. In this example I am turning off Resume in Preview.app:

defaults write com.apple.Preview NSQuitAlwaysKeepsWindows -bool false

To turn the Resume feature back on just change the false command to true:

defaults write com.apple.Preview NSQuitAlwaysKeepsWindows -bool true

If you disable the Resume feature, you can temporarily Resume all open windows on the next launch by holding down the option key and the “Quit” menu item changes to “Quit and Keep Windows” or you can press Commnad-Option-Quit.

Tags: Lion, Tip, Terminal