MacOS specifically does terrible job at visually managing apps.
I frequently end up with a bloated dock with a ton of icons signalling that the app behind them is open (the little dot on top of them).
When I close all the windows of an app why on earth does the app stay open? Why do I need to have Powerpoint open in the dock with no Powerpoint windows open? Especially today that we have SSDs and fast processors that can launch an app within a couple of seconds?
If an app needs to run in the background without UI, there is the menu bar for them.
Linux and Windows have much more rational UX regarding desktop usage.
It still might be doing something. Mail, for instance, is sitting there occasionally checking for new mail even if you have zero windows open.
And I dunno about you, but my 2017 Macbook Pro still takes a significant amount of time to launch Big Serious Apps with a ton of plugins. I like being able to tab over to Illustrator and hit command-n and be fucking around in a new canvas with absolutely no waiting. We have virtual memory, open apps in the background doing nothing but waiting around to be used will get frozen to disc, then get restored a lot faster than they boot up. I generally hate it when apps auto-close themselves without asking when I close the last document like Windows tends to.
And that's a terrible abstraction that, for some reason, happens for any application, whether they have a background job or not. System tray + taskbar is miles better.
> When I close all the windows of an app why on earth does the app stay open?
Apple agrees and indeed many of its first-party apps work like that. Close the last window in Numbers, Keynote, Preview, and the app will disappear from the Dock.
This is opt-in by the app for compatibility reasons, and Powerpoint has not opted in, perhaps because there's no obvious benefit to the app for doing so.
Wish the dock could be disabled completely. I have it set to the smallest size and hidden on the left side, but it still gets triggered occasionally. Having it standard size and chewing up space at the bottom of the screen seems insane to me - what a waste of screen real estate.
Like you, I use Cmd-Tab to know what I have open (and you can obviously Cmd-Q while there to close apps) and Cmd-Space to open apps. I never use the Dock or the grid of icons view or any equivalent (not sure what they're even called).
I don't have a mac anymore to check but there was a magic pref that I set from the commandline to adjust the auto-show delay. I set it to something like 10s which made sure that it effectively never appeared by accident. If you really don't want it I assume you could set the delay to a couple of hours.
I also rarely use the dock (unless I'm forced to — e.g. to navigate to the freakin' Trash/Bin folder) but that's separate to the point of applications staying open even when all their windows have been closed.
The idea is that windows are documents, not the whole application. You can close all of the documents. Then you can start a new document, open an existing document or quite the app.
Someone who has worked with Macs for a while will just close the app with CMD-Q or use the menu. It seems weird to have to close the individual documents to close the app. Many of my apps are setup to reload the same documents when the app restarts do quitting the app doesn’t abandon the documents, it just files them away until the next time the app is opened.
There are non-document oriented apps that only use one window and when that window is closed, they are setup to close the app.
You obviously spent a long time on Windows where the windows were the app and closing the window closed the app. Documents are secondary.
The UI only offers a big red X button. You have no idea what it does, until you click it. Maybe it will close a window. Maybe it will close the last window leaving the app running in the background with no UI. Maybe it will quit the app.
In KDE/Gnome/Windows you know what the X buttons does. It closes an instance of an app. If it happens to be the only instance of the app, it will close the app as well. You don't have to babysit the open apps.
For the very few exceptions that an app needs to run in the backround, you will be notified that by pressing X the app will go to the taskbar.
MacOS also has a taskbar for apps that run in the background, but it also has apps running in the background in the dock. It made sense a decade ago with the slow hard drives, now it is just a peril of the past. Similar to the C drive in windows.
This isn't just a difference in UI, but also in the way the OS handles processes. Under macOS, the vast majority of programs host all windows under the same process. In other words, windows do not represent instances of apps, even under the hood. You can spawn additional instances of an app with the terminal, which will give each instance its own dock icon, menubar, and set of windows.
So shifting window closing behavior to function like that of Linux or Windows would actually require a much more fundamental change than it might seem.
The Apple HIG says there's a difference between applications and documents. An application might have a bunch of utility windows but those are hidden unless the application is in the foreground. So an application with no open documents running in the background isn't visually cluttering the screen. Application launch tends to be (and definitely used to be twenty years ago) pretty expensive in terms of resources. So leaving an application open without documents tends to make opening new documents faster.
The red button on windows on macOS is meant to convey the action is potentially destructive to the window's contents. Even if the "destruction" of a utility window just means it goes away. It's not tied to quitting the application, with exception of single-window applications like System Preferences, for the above launch cost reasoning.
This has all gotten muddy over the past twenty years. The App Resume/Restore feature in Lion (peak Forstall) is terrible and I disable it on every Mac I use for more than a minute. I can see it being helpful for some people but it breaks the way I expect the system to behave after using Macs for 30+ years.
As a user of Macs since 1984, I love that most apps now save ongoing changes and document state so that I can close most apps and restart them later with the same document reloaded and any changes automatically saved. Documents are closed when I am done with them.
And it never leaves the app running with no UI either, because the menu is part of the UI, and it's still running.
This is probably not obvious if you're not used to macOS, but that's a bad reason not to do things this way IMHO. It's completely obvious to me.
The red dot closes windows. All three coloured dots are window commands.
Not that I use them much, I use Moom for window sizing and Cmd-W to close windows and tab (Shift-Cmd-W to close a window full of tabs). But that's just me: the dots are there if you want to use them, and what they do is completely consistent.
You're not used to what they do, but that's not the same thing.
Some apps definitely do behave the 'closing the last window closes the app' way, although this is obviously bad from a consistency point of view.
> the menu is part of the UI
I would argue that that global menu is not part of the application's UI. True, it's application-specific, but it's very easy for a novice user to miss the context switch and just be left with the impression that the app is some kind of 'phantom'.
It's not really up for debate, the menu is part of an application's UI in macOS, that is, part of the Interface which the User uses to interact with the application. I assume you're right about a novice user, I haven't been one in many years.
That's why the name of the application is always directly to the right of the apple icon, that tells you which application is in focus, and all the menu items next to it are application-specific. The global part of the menu is just that apple icon, and the menu tray off further to the right.
Can you point me to an example of a macOS app which closes when the last window is closed? I literally can't think of one.
I'll let it go because it's not a very interesting debate and it's not the main point anyway. I haven't been a novice user for ~10 years, but I can still remember what it was like moving from Windows to MacOS — quite confusing!
> Can you point me to an example of a macOS app which closes when the last window is closed?
Most apps that close when the windows closes are not document-oriented apps. For them, there is only one window and one function. The calculator app you mention is a good example. Once you close that window the app has no other purpose it is setup to auto-close the app.
Document-oriented apps expect that, after you close the document, you might want to open another one or start a new document.
What you say makes logical sense, but I share some of the OP's frustration, and it was particularly confusing when I started using a Mac, having come from the Windows world. Heck, if we're being really logical, why isn't opening stuff the exact opposite of closing stuff? If that were true, opening a file would do nothing if its application weren't already running — and I don't think anyone wants that.
The specific use case, which I do fairly frequently, is to Cmd-W the last open window and then Cmd-N for a new document, or Cmd-O to open an existing document.
When I try that on Windows, the program closes, and I have to re-launch it. I daresay that's more annoying than discovering that a program hasn't quit when you think it should have.
Where do you type Cmd-N/Cmd-O "into" if you just closed the last open window? I am not aware of macOS continuing to give kbd focus to an application with no open windows, but maybe I just don't use macOS enough to realize that it works this way.
Well it depends on the program you are using but programs that follow a document-style layout usually allow you to close a document without quitting the program (in the File menu or Ctrl-W).
The big 'X' will always quit the program though as that's what the user would expect. Imagine Chrome/Firefox's big 'X' only closing the current tab (is that how it works on a Mac?).
Yeah, I see your point. It really was about initial expectations — now I'm used to it, it's fine, but it was incredibly confusing coming from the Windows world ("why's this application still open? i can't even 'see' it, what's it doing?")
An interesting sidebar does Mac handle swapping out applications better than Windows/Linux do? Both have a history of becoming unusable. I also suspect its more common for more expensive Mac machines to have more than minimally adequate RAM whereas many cheap machines are often sold with barely enough especially historically.
Someone who cut their teeth on other platforms may regard the death of an application with its last window as an essential part of their machine staying usable.
I don't know if you ever owned one of those really old windows ce devices but in a certain era it had the delightful workflow that closing them didn't kill them and after a while you could open as many applications as memory could hold and you would need to go into a different menu entirely to close unused applications or you couldn't open anything else. Like the worst of both worlds.
>MacOS specifically does terrible job at visually managing apps.
I'd say that Windows traditionally did a terrible job of allowing applications to have multiple documents open at once and visible on a large monitor.
The traditional Windows Multiple Document Interface UI was a nightmare if you wanted to have more than one document (especially documents from more than one app) visible at once on screen.
I do not follow. I have two excel documents open. Each is presented to the user like an independent excel app. So in my windows taskbar there will be two excel icons stacked. If I hover I will get a quick preview of all of the excel instances that are open.
If I close one document the excel instance that is running that window will close too. The other instance of excel with its document will remain unaffected.
Have you not noticed all the comments complaining that Macs see closing a document and closing a program as two separate things, while Windows still does not?
Edit: It wasn't until Office 2007 that some Microsoft apps (but not others) started breaking the Win32 MDI UI.
I remember feeling fancy as a teenager when I implemented MDI for a Windows application. Likely an HTML editor. Probably in VB6, maybe VC++. I just did it because I could and now I wonder how many big corps also did that because they could.
I frequently end up with a bloated dock with a ton of icons signalling that the app behind them is open (the little dot on top of them).
When I close all the windows of an app why on earth does the app stay open? Why do I need to have Powerpoint open in the dock with no Powerpoint windows open? Especially today that we have SSDs and fast processors that can launch an app within a couple of seconds?
If an app needs to run in the background without UI, there is the menu bar for them.
Linux and Windows have much more rational UX regarding desktop usage.