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Comment by tqwhite | Hacker News Reader

I have used Macintoshes since 1984 and I never once even noticed this dichotomy. When I looked at this app, I thought, "Huh? Why would I care about that?" I literally never once considered the accumulation of open apps to be any sort of inconvenience. Having it brought up, I realize that land on the pro-Mac-style side of the conversation.

When I have used Windows (and it's a fair amount), I am often annoyed to have an app that I thought was in the Taskbar gone. The cognitive step of thinking it was there, looking for it, seeing it gone, realizing I closed its last window and hunting it down in the (still appalling) Start Menu is distracting.

I consider it to be another example of my long held belief that Microsoft never, ever chosen the right alternative in any esthetic decision in its UI.

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As a counterpoint, I have used Macintoshes since 1987 and it's always bugged me.

Particularly because of the inconsistency -- Control Panel (now System Settings) has always quit when you closed its window, but most other apps don't. (While QuickTime maddeningly acts both ways, depending on what you've done in the app.) I can't tell you how many times I ask myself why the heck Activity Monitor is running in the dock, only to realized that I closed the window rather than quitting it.

Having a GUI application, in a windows-based environment, run without any windows is just weird unless it's a background utility or something. Conceptually I've just never been able to get used to it.

I'm very happy that a lot of applications have moved to a single "master" window with documents living in tabs (e.g. Sublime, Photoshop, etc.), than the strange "menubar with no windows" app state. (Made even stranger by further inconsistent behavior where, for example, if you close all TextEdit or Terminal windows, it's in menubar-only mode, and then switch to a different app it's running in the background, but then if you tap the running TextEdit or Terminal in the dock it mysteriously makes a new window. Huh?)

The Mac behavior comes into play with “document” apps (text, image, or whatever). You have app running and a document open. You can then close that document and open other document. You don’t want the app to close when you close the document.

Conversely it works well with apps that reload documents when they restart. You just close the app without closing the document. When you restart the app, the document is loaded and state is preserved.

This is not about a desire to keep apps running in the background, though there was some advantage to that in the old days when starting an app did take considerable time. Leaving it running in the background for some shortish time made some sense.

Non-document apps (like control panel) generally close when the window closes because there is no document to open and close. They usually only have a single window, anyway, or at least not multiple independent windows.

When I close an app, I want it closed, not in standby or running background tasks.

...close the app then?

It's just a different paradigm. It's not like quitting the app is in any way difficult (it's just cmd+Q which I actually find a bit too easy to trigger by accident sometimes), it's just Macs don't consider an app to be the sum of its windows.

Sure, it's not hard to hit cmd-q instead of cmd-w, I think the general question is "what's the benefit to me, the user, of having an app still running (and in memory, until it gets paged out to disk) without any windows open?" Obviously there are some kinds of apps that it makes sense to have running in the background all the time, but we're talking about text or image editors, say. I find it to be sort of annoying.

For document apps, the idea is that you are working on a document. You can then close that document and open another document without the app closing when you close the first document. It’s not really about having apps running in the background. It’s just a slightly different way to look at documents and apps.

I guess that suggests an over-optimization in favor of working on more of the same documents eventually - but I might not do that any time soon... I opened an app, edited a document in it. When I am done, unless I have other files open in that app, it seems like it might as well be completely closed, until I launch it again or open one of the document types associated with it? I guess some users may only work on a few kinds of files, and in a few apps, so they might benefit from slightly quicker load times; otherwise having a bunch of things running on the off chance I use one again seems like a waste of RAM.

…and in that case, you would close the app.

Conflating closing a document window with closing the app seems like a strange constraint.

The behavior is archaic though. I've mentioned this in comments before, but the design really only makes sense if you look back at how macOS used to work. Only one application would be running at a time. To get to another application (including Finder), you had to quit the running application. In that context, it's a bit more reasonable to have an application running without any windows.

So then close the app, not the window. There’s plenty of times where being able to close all windows and start from scratch makes sense. So much so that there are all sort of apps when you close the last window that default to presenting a new window where you can open another document/project, start a new one or do some other tasks. (Think any app with a start/splash page). Why not just have the ability to choose your new task from the menu and skip the splash page entirely?

Close it how? I just closed the window. What's the handle, then? Do I have to open it again to go to some menu (or a shortcut) to close it?

This is completely unintuitive, unless you are a long term mac user. Neither windows nor any of the hundreds of linux window managers work so unexpectedly.

When you close a window the active application doesn’t change so the menubar attached to the top of the screen is still there to close the app if desired (and keyboard shortcuts will still target that application).

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