By Jason Snell

November 25, 2014 4:12 PM PT

Attack of the 50-foot Save Sheet

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

This morning I tried to save a file in BBEdit, only to discover that I couldn’t see half of the save sheet—it was so large, it went off the bottom of the screen.

It turns out—and thanks to Jon Gotow of St. Clair Software, maker of the excellent Default Folder X, for the answer to this—that there’s a bug in Yosemite that causes a sheet to grow taller by 22 pixels every time you use it.

Once that sheet’s off the bottom of the screen, you can no longer grab the bottom of the sheet to make it shorter… so you’re hosed. And so was I, until Gotow gave me these Terminal commands:

 defaults delete -app BBEdit NSNavPanelExpandedSizeForOpenMode
 defaults delete -app BBEdit NSNavPanelExpandedSizeForSaveMode

…where you use the name of the affected app instead of “BBEdit” in the above example.

If you’re using Chrome, you need to target its bundle identifier:

 defaults delete com.google.Chrome NSNavPanelExpandedSizeForOpenMode
 defaults delete com.google.Chrome NSNavPanelExpandedSizeForSaveMode

According to Gotow, what happened is that Apple changed the file dialogs so that the title bar is now considered to be part of the window—and changed the math everywhere except in save sheets.

Hopefully Apple will fix this in a future Yosemite update. In the meantime, if you use an app that saves files via the sheet style, you might want to remind yourself to shrink its height a bit every so often.

[Update: Daniel Ericsson points out that if you hold down the shift key and drag inward on the edge of the save sheet, the sheet will get shorter—even if there’s no room for the sheet to actually get narrower!]

[Update x2: A new beta of Default Folder X now fixes this bug. It’s free for a 30 day trial, if this bug is biting you, and it’s a cool add-on!]

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