sonoma ignores setting for not restoring windows

[stevemiller]

this happens in spite of a clear system setting that says "windows will not be restored when you re-open an application". it also happens at random, so its in no way "intended behaviour."

it is both annoying and a potential privacy risk that opening a piece of first party software will frequently open files you did not ask it to open.

with terminal, i will sometimes have been running multiple sessions before quitting, and when i reopen it, it will respawn countless redundant windows for no reason:

in the above case i was using terminal to monitor blender sessions the previous day. you could argue "maybe this is a blender issue," however even exclusively with apple's first party software like preview, it will not only open the file i asked for, but pick a random file i'd previously had open with preview and also open it. to me, this feels like a pretty substantial privacy issue.

i'm pretty sure this behaviour started with sonoma.

is anyone else experiencing this problem? and is there any options people can think of to stop it? i'm losing my mind after countless times during a busy workday having to manage pointless file windows spawning all over the place.

 

[chabig]

Did you check Terminal settings? I expect app settings can override system settings.

 

[stevemiller]

Did you check Terminal settings? I expect app settings can override system settings.

Terminal app preferences doesn’t have any re-opening behaviour that I could find. Likewise this isn’t limited to a single app. Any first party Apple app that can open multiple documents at once exhibits this out of control behaviour. Preview. QuickTime. Etc.

Is this a case of corrupt plist files or something? I haven’t used those “cleanup” apps like Onyx in over a decade and know a lot of them are bloatware (cleanmymacx). I’d also really rather not have to waste time doing a full reinstall since glitches like this seem to show up frequently in Apple software.

Was hoping someone else came across this glitch and maybe had a targeted solve.