This is an interesting app in terms of illuminating expectations of different user groups.
Back in 2010 when I got my first MacBook, the app not closing when the window closed was alien to me as someone who had only ever used Windows. But that discomfort only lasted a few months, and I grew to strongly prefer the distinction of “this app is running” and “this app is has a window open” + value the difference between Cmd-Q and Cmd-W.
I remember one OS update made the app closing behavior the default, and I had to go learn where the setting was to undo it; a subsequent OS backtracked on that. The distinction is less meaningful these days with NVME making apps launch much faster than spinning 2.5” drives, but stuff like Photoshop still has a long startup time.
Why do you prefer having an app running (and owning the sole menu bar) when it has no GUI on screen?
I switched to Mac 20 years ago (when I started a decade-long stint as software engineer at Apple), and I still DETEST this behavior. Why the hell do I want some application that I just "closed" to continue owning the menu? Of course, this indicts the Mac's single menu bar, glued to the top of the screen. That mistake should have been fixed with the transition to OS X, but nope.
A related issue is Apple's half-assed implementation of Alt-Tab-style app switching. I was pretty impressed that they added this Windows-style feature, but less so after finding that it doesn't restore minimized apps. Again, why do I want to switch back to an app but not restore its UI? Fortunately there's a utility for that: Alt-Tab. https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app
It can also create a window for applications that lack them when you switch to them; this is a huge boon for Finder.
If its a app with a document model, it kinda has to?
You close a word document, and then open another (through menu item), it shouldn't close the app in between. Also its not uncommon for me to close all the browser windows but leave the browser running, so that I can easily cmd-tab there and open new window. Yes, you can kind of workaround with some MDI style window, which you then would have to hide when not wanting to quit, but feels a bit unnecessary.
In the category of "single window apps", I wouldn't want my music to stop playing just because the gui of spotify is not visible. Granted, Hide might be a better option than closing the window, depending on if the app being active is useful without the gui. With spotify in particular, I would expect space to act as a play/pause even without gui visible, though annoyingly it seems they have not implemented it like that (apple music does).
I've never encountered any confusion of this sort with Word on Windows, nor with Windows's window-management in general.
Nor have I encountered music apps ceasing playback just because their window is minimized... with one exception: Apple Music stops playback if you minimize it when a music video is playing.
I think the issue on Macs is down to Apple forcing all applications to share a single menu, instead of putting the menu on the application's main window frame the way every other GUI evolved to. A single menu glued to the top of the screen reduces your entire desktop to one application's client area, instead of an open workspace for many applications. This weakness has historically degraded the Mac's multi-monitor experience too.
Fortunately, most Mac apps have finally abandoned their penchant for barfing out a flotilla of windows all over the screen, and gone to a modern single-window design.
Apple has attempted several workarounds for the window-management problem, like "Exposė" and "Stage Manager" and "Mission Control." The first thing I do with a new Mac OS install is disable all those irritating hotkeys... and STILL find windows randomly zooming out to a gallery sometimes.
I like the Mac concept of the global menu bar that represents which application is focused thus, for example, which app will receive hot keys including cmd-Q.
When you get used to it, it’s jarring to go back to Windows and realize you don’t even know the name of an unfamiliar app that is open much less which one will be alt-f4’d if you were to press it.
Why should you have to look for the name of an application to see if it's focused? If that's true, the GUI is a failure.
Knowing which app has focus does not require the entire system to be limited to a single menu. It simply requires proper visual feedback to SHOW the user which window (and attached menu) is active.
Hahahah, there it is, the once-inevitable "Fitt's law" trope.
People citing 'Fitt's law" to defend this dumb menu design love to ignore the big D in that "law." And what does the D stand for? DISTANCE.
Fitt's law dictates that the menu should be on the application's main frame, because that's closer to where the user is working (thus minimizing D). That's more true today than ever, as screen sizes and resolutions have reached new heights.
It's the ratio of the distance and the size what matters, not the distance itself. In this sense the menubar has infinite size because you cannot move the pointer forward it, thus you cannot miss it.
Fitt's law was for mouse (not trackpad) and for small screens where the menu was near the window. Both of these are for less common now.
Also now we have Search function within menus.
Nowadays it's easier to navigate menus with keyboard than pointing device.
> Why do you prefer having an app running (and owning the sole menu bar) when it has no GUI on screen?
Here's a story from when I was using Windows for work after using Macs for ages. I had one folder in Sublime Text open, and I wanted to close that window and then open another one. So I hit the [X] button in the corner, which closed the window, and then I instinctively went to the global menu bar at the top of the screen to go to 'File › Open' to open my new window. But of course, it wasn't there, because closing the window also got rid of my ability to access the menu bar.
And then I opened Sublime Text again, and it re-opened with the old window I wanted to get rid of.
This is why, like others in this thread, I've grown to really like the application-vs-window separation. Having a menu bar on each window, and having programs close themselves when they get down to zero windows, means I have to do my operations in a certain order (I have to open my second window before I can close the first one, I can't do it in either order) and use a UI hierarchy that I don't think makes sense (I have to use the menu bar of an existing window to open a new window, even though that operation has nothing to do with that window's contents).
I think the reason people might prefer it is because it avoids the startup time. The parent mentioned Photoshop - an already-open Photoshop with no windows can open up a new window instantly, whereas a closed Photoshop will have to go through the whole startup process again.
This, pre-SSDs, used to be a much, much bigger deal. Now it's not as big a deal, but if you've been using Macs for 20 years surely you've felt the difference between opening a window of an already-open app vs opening an app from scratch.
I personally love that I can have all the apps I want permanently open on my Mac, and never have to experience the delay of anything launching. A new window just pops up instantly when I wanna interact with an app. It's great.
This doesn't require that the dismissed application still have control of the menu, however.
It's annoying when you momentarily check a new E-mail message, minimize Mail, and then try to zoom the Web page you're looking at... only to find that it doesn't work because Mail still has control of the menu. And to fix that you have to click on the browser's window, which is a hypocritical admission that the GUI is the expected means of interacting with an application.
That depends on the application. Most modern applications (fortunately) shun the pile of floating windows that dominated Mac application design historically. For document-centric applications, developers can implement MDI style or tabs and keep their app tidy.
I rarely find that momentarily checking an email changes the zoom level that I prefer on a web page, but if I did, I think Command-Tab Command-+ would allow me to change it quickly.
I much more frequently quickly check an email, close it, and then want to send a new email than I want to change the zoom on a web page as my next action.
The zoom example was only that: an example of an attempt to interact with the "active" application on the screen that fails because the menu does not correspond to the application that's being shown.
Feel free to replace the Mail-&-browser example with two applications that YOU might want to bounce between.
I’d prefer that application stay open so that I can accomplish my next task and that Command-N does “make me a new one of what I was just doing, not a new one of the thing I was doing before that”.
It's a different model to what you are used to and IMHO more flexible and powerful. If you try and keep operating in a manner learned on a different model you will inevitably be frustrated.
OK so now we have to issue a series of hotkeys (and then another series to undo them) in order to achieve what only requires half those actions on other systems.
There has been no evidence provided to show how this design is "more flexible and powerful," since all the same options exist on Windows, which ALSO offers other options that require half the steps to achieve app-switching.
That’s why I just cmd+(shift+)tab and cmd+(shift+)`. No need to use a mouse and it doesn’t bother me that the window stays in the background. Most apps run in full screen anyway. Same with windows: alt+tab (citrix…) is the way to go.
I haven’t minimised a window in months. For those special needs, there’s expose.
A window does represent an application on some systems. It doesn't on the Mac, because of the aforementioned single-menu problem. It turns your entire screen into the client area for a single application, whereas other windowing GUIs treat the desktop as an infinite workspace that can show many applications.
That makes it EASIER to deal with "each independently."
Funny, I really like the macOS approach. I could make a similar list, but with Windows on the "why would you want that" side. Here's what I like about the macOS approach:
- If an app is open, load times for new windows are instantaneous; I have a M2 and the difference between a new window for an app that's open and launching an app is still pretty noticeable for most apps. It's definitely noticeable on my Windows PC, and it's mildly annoying.
- I don't have to keep track of what's running: A new or main window for a frequently-used app is always just Cmd-Tab, Cmd+N/0/whatever, regardless of whether I already have five windows open or none at all. Allows me to keep the dock hidden too since I typically don't need to see what's running and what isn't.
- Cmd+Tab is more like a context-sensitive window launcher than a list of windows for me, one that I can navigate quickly by keyboard; select an app, hit h for hide, q for quit, up-arrow to see all its windows. If I might need an app, like CaptureOne, it's in the Dock; if I'm actually likely to need it, like Mail, it'll be in Cmd+Tab (possibly autostarted), add/remove from/to the latter is really low-friction (Cmd+Space, Cmd+Q), macOS optimizes resource usage so running apps don't bog down the machine. I find that a lot more useful than the simple list of windows I get via Windows Alt+Tab. Grouping windows per app keeps the size of that list manageable, though there are cases when that gets in the way somewhat. That's true for Alt+Tab too, it gets crowded real quick, requiring a lot more tab-ing.
- Another advantage of the macOS paradigm: Less background agents; seems every other app on Windows has one. By far not as frequent on macOS since you don't necessarily need a background service to speed up starting times or run updates; I see those things mostly in apps that have been sloppily transplanted from Windows, or that actually need to do meaningful work when the app isn't running, like Little Snitch.
- Cmd+Tab does restore hidden windows, just not minimized ones. A distinction that Windows doesn't have, IIRC, but one that I find useful. Cmd+H is for getting things out of sight, minimize is for getting things out of the way completely. Windows minimize is more like hide, but for individual windows.
- I like the single menu bar; every app has one, and it's always in the same place, and it's always the foremost app's and even if I don't have an active window right now, I can still run updates, open files, open windows, ... without a launcher screen or similar cludges. I think Windows integrates something similar into a task icon popup these days. I've noticed many modern Windows apps have their own ideas about what a menu should look like, how you access it, whether you need one in the first place, whether you should be able to navigate it by keyboard. IIRC even Office does that, not a fan. On macOS you can assign a keyboard shortcut to every menu item of any app via System Preferences, you can search menu items, there are apps that render nice overlays with the available functionality and keyboard shortcuts based on the menus, all of that's up to the individual app on Windows (and it seems most are moving towards mouse-only navigation there). The macOS menu system is also pretty neat for accessibility and automation. I've built apps (not for wider distribution) that consisted of just the menu and didn't even have a real UI, because that's enough for some things, super quick and easy to build from non-Apple languages, and trivial to automate.
You seem to feel like macOS should be a carbon copy of Windows w.r.t. window management, but it's not, macOS apps are pretty different conceptually than Windows applications, and different states are supposed to mean different things, interactions aren't supposed to work the same, different compromises in a lot of places. Both approaches work and have a theoretical underpinning that I think is sound, it's just different, and I think it's nice to have options. You want the Windows way of doing things? I guess Windows is always going to do the best job at being Windows, so use that? Unless you're still at Apple, then I guess you're out of luck.
> It can also create a window for applications that lack them when you switch to them; this is a huge boon for Finder.
I agree it's annoying that Finder doesn't do this (somehow it's almost the only app where that behaviour annoys me). I probably could do something like that in Hammerspoon, too. Hmmmm.
Most of what you cite here isn't dependent on the single-menu design, however. Application startup time, the way things are listed in Alt-Tab galleries, "background agents..." Valid beefs, perhaps, but none is related to the single-menu issue.
"I like the single menu bar; every app has one, and it's always in the same place, and it's always the foremost app's"
That's simply not true. I can have one application on my Mac screen, Safari, and yet the menu belongs to Mail. That's just dumb.
You do correctly call out one of the (sadly plentiful) regressions in Windows: the sudden deletion of the standard menu from many applications' window frames. It was just as "findable" as the Mac's for most of Windows's existence, but now it's just often... missing. WTF? The Office UI is an absolute shitshow, and the rest of Windows has been circling the drain for years.
Therefore no, I don't think the Mac should be a copy of Windows. I just hate the single-menu design and the pervasive UI clumsiness that has emanated from it. Any mode of operation it offers can also be offered by any other windowing GUI, minus of course the glued-in-place single menu... actually, you can mimic even that by maximizing your applications and Alt-Tabbing between them.
> > "I like the single menu bar; every app has one, and it's always in the same place, and it's always the foremost app's"
> That's simply not true. I can have one application on my Mac screen, Safari, and yet the menu belongs to Mail. That's just dumb.
Right, it's the one belonging to the active application, not the foremost one (though, most often, the two will be the same). On Windows, an application and its main UI are very tightly coupled; macOS sees the two as separate entities, and I think Mail is a good example for an app where that totally makes sense, since that way I can open a new e-mail dialog without going through the main UI; just Cmd+Tab to Mail, Cmd+N, or Cmd+0 if I need the main UI, and if I don't explicitly close it or minimize it (and Cmd+H instead or just Cmd+Tab back to the browser or whatever) it'll come right up when I Cmd+Tab to Mail. I think that's a pretty smart way of doing things.
Similarly, with Finder, I can just hit Cmd+K for the "Connect to Server" dialog, Enter, and I'm on my NAS since it remembers the last server address. No unneeded Explorer window popping up, no mouse required, pretty quick. I can close the current browser window and keep a minimized window with a few tabs I'll need for an activity later this evening, because the browser doesn't have to have a UI just to be active. Those tabs sit down there and out of the way, but I still have them and their state. Windows would force the minimized window to the foreground when I Alt+Tab to the browser, and it's hard to think of a system-wide scheme that does what you want, but still allows for this. I think actually the macOS paradigm is quite a bit more flexible.
> Therefore no, I don't think the Mac should be a copy of Windows. I just hate the single-menu design and the pervasive UI clumsiness that has emanated from it.
How tightly an app and its UI are coupled has nothing to do with the single menubar. It does sound like you have a very strong preference for the way Windows does things, and you expect things to work that way, and where they don't, you hate that. Why don't you just stick with Windows? After all, the great thing about having options is that I can have the macOS way and you can have the Windows way and we can all be happy.
I have been having the opposite working on Windows recently. I have gotten used to closing windows (like Visual Studio Code) because it reopened to a directory I didn't want and doing Command+N to open a new window. When I do that in Windows, I have to reopen the whole app and the window I didn't want pops up again.
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.
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.
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.
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).
What a great little utility -- part of my growing collection of tools to make MacOS behave more reasonably, or at least more in line with my particular expectations (which, yes, in many cases means more like Windows).
I think that part of the appeal of an app like this is about keeping things "tidy". MacOS seems to be built around making it easy to clutter -- lots of randomly sized overlapping windows (resolved using Rectangle for Aero-snap like functionality -- the weird full-screen split-screen nonsense in MacOS is just frustratingly limited and slow and has too many animations and transitions to be useful), dozens of apps filling up the dock, six hundred icons in the menu bar (which I use vanilla.app to resolve), and so on.
I think my mental model distinguishes between applications and utilities. Utilities are effectively like the old TSR tools -- you start them, then they just run quietly in the background until you need them, with no interface. Applications, by contrast, _are_ their interface, so it feels strange that when I close that interface, the application itself isn't closed. This utility alters the behaviour of the OS so that it conforms to this mental model. I suspect that this is a situation where there's no "right" approach, but rather a set of preferences and learned behaviours.
On Mac I usually just double click somewhere in the title bar on a window to make it automatically size to fill up the whole screen, seems to work like a charm every time. Note, I’m not talking about the full screen mode which is something different.
I do use that, but I find that it's inconsistent. From what I can tell, it seems to toggle between the current size and the previous size -- which becomes problematic when using an external screen. Or perhaps that's just Finder -- it's hard to tell! Frustratingly, this matches the behaviour of alt-clicking (sorry, option-clicking) on the maximise button, and I really love being able to have two windows comfortably share a screen with no wasted space, aero-snap style.
I think you are right, it is the finder app that behaves a little differently, which I’ve always assumed is because you typically need to drag files in and out of the finder so it leaves a gap to make that easy, but you can still make it full screen if you want. I’ve never noticed this with any other apps.
In contrast, many of the behaviors are better on the Mac, but they do take some getting used to. The reason Apple doesn’t ‘just add a preference’ is that that would prevent people from getting over that little hurdle of getting used to it.
Just like cleaning up the recently used app list on the phone all the time, quitting all applications like this is a step backwards.
I'm not so sure that the behaviours on one system are necessarily "better". I know that my preferences lie in one direction (away from MacOS), and I infer that yours lie in another. If a computer is a tool to get some set of things done, and these can be achieved with equivalent ease in systems which align to your preferences compared to the those which align with mine, then those preferences must be subjective.
Phones have a different pedigree -- I'm not upset if an app that's "open" is unloaded after some time or due to system pressure, even if I lose state on my phone, possibly because that's how things have always been (for a given value of "always"), and possibly also because phones don't have a dock or task bar to track "running" apps. On a computer, if the app windows being closed means the app is (mostly) unloaded and I will need to restore state with a new window, why not close it entirely? What does having it sitting in the dock with a dot consuming (admittedly few) resources give me beyond just pinning a shortcut?
You are prepared to fight the system, while you don’t know why it is doing what it is doing and what you are gaining by fighting.
Your arguments are mostly ‘I’m used to Windows doing X so that’s what I want on the Mac.’ If you want Windows, use Windows, that’s a lot easier than trying to get Mac OS to be Windows. It’s not Windows, if you can get used to what it is you’ll have a great time and if not you’ll end up frustrating yourself.
This smacks of the typical Apple, "you're holding it wrong" condescension. I understand why MacOS does things the way it does most of the time. That doesn't mean that I can't still find it frustrating.
Interesting app, curious what the use case is?
Mac OS has always been good at managing resources for background apps (in my experience). I don’t mind if I have some extra open apps. I think I even have the setting activated that hides the ‘dot’ to show ‘running’ apps.
Honestly, if you look in activity monitor there are over a hundred apps running without any windows being rendered.
Maybe it’s because I’ve always had more ram than I need?
Most apps on my M1 mac load instantly. And there is very little I can do with a loaded app that has no documents open (as opposed to maybe in the MacOS <= 9 era). But the icons stick around and clutter the dock. Eventually the icons will shrink or I confuse similar icons. If I want an app icon to stay, I can just pin it.
Of course you can close the app manually, but that is cumbersome: You close every window with command-W or a click, but have to remember to close the very last window with command-Q. If you select the app icon to quit, it will not just activate the app, but open a new Window. So the best way is to right click the dock icon and close. But then you have to think if there is still an window open or not, so you don't accidentially close it.
It's not a big deal, but it is a slight annoyance, just like how you can't close minimized windows. Apple actually implemented auto quitting apps in the Lion era, but removed it (probably because it was to Windowsy?).
I find it incredibly confusing and pointless when I'm alt-tabbing to an application, but then "nothing happens" (e.g. only the menu bar changes but the app has no windows open - I really can't understand why such ancient "MacOS-isms" are still carried along - like, what's the point of a UI application lingering around when there's no UI?)
Disclaimer: Mac is my main platform since around 2010, before that Windows, and before that Amiga - one would think that more than a decade would be enough to acclimate, but the whole application model on Mac still feels weird :)
Having taken a moment to look at this, I think I'm going to conclude that while this nicely implemented, this is mostly a tool for satisfying personal preferences.
It looks like this app just sends a request to terminate (AppKit.NSRunningApplication.terminate()) to any app with no open windows (after a delay). If the app is already ready to terminate (termination counter is 0), most of the terminate work has likely already been done, and the app will probably just get killed. If the app isn't ready to terminate, invoking terminate is going to cause it to wake up and do whatever its own processes for terminating might be. For something lumbering and bloated like an Adobe app, this is going to be a ton of stuff. For modern macOS apps with good support for sudden termination/automatic termination, this is probably little or nothing at all.
So for apps that work well on macOS, this accomplishes little more than removing the icon from the dock and the app switcher. For apps that don't work well on macOS, this might or might not help things work any better.
With other operating systems, maybe quitting unused apps is worthwhile for performance or battery life or whatever. And some applications on the Mac, like (unfortunately) Excel, don't cooperate as well as they could with OS resource management, so quitting them when you're not using them is probably good. Otherwise, a modern macOS app that goes idle is going to be compressed and paged out and suspended so that it's not really soaking up any resources if it's not doing anything (even if it has windows and documents open, incidentally).
So, sure, quit apps with no open windows if you just want a tidy dock and app switcher. Unless I'm missing something, I think that might be all you're really getting.
You can quit from within the command+tab overlay by hitting q while you're stilling holding command and have tabbed onto the relevant application. That's how I do it.
What’s the point of a keyboard in a GUI OS, then? You can just copy/paste any text you need.
Just because you can stand on your right leg doesn’t mean your left leg is useless. Learning to work with keyboard shortcuts together with your point-and-click skills will make you more efficient.
Way to miss the point - when there are two interfaces, and people are demanding that both have feature parity (or same level of ease of use), it is stupid to point that since one of the interface is easier people should prefer that.
I quit apps due to the hassle/delay of app windows loading after a restart.
(macOS can't discern between apps I shut off manually before a restart and apps the OS shut off for the restart, so it ends up opening everything anyway.)
Apparently Windows users find it confusing to have a windowless app, because it's not what they're used to. I can see why they might want this utility.
Unfortunately, Apple proponents love to smugly point to hotkeys as if "it's so simple."
Great example: Apple's bizarre and petty refusal to put a real Delete key on its laptop or non-full-sized keyboards. They only have a Backspace key, mislabeled "delete." This means that millions of users are arrowing (or moving the insertion point by hand) across the characters they want to delete and backspacing them away. Apple apologists will howl, NOOOO! Command-delete! As if any normal user (especially switching from another platform) would guess this. And yes, they would have to guess this, because it's not marked on the keyboard.
This became doubly inexcusable with the deprecation of the Eject key. It's not as if Apple could pretend that there was "no room" for a Delete key... not that they could anyway, since everyone else manages to provide one.
Mac is the only operating system with keyboard shortcuts?
I don't think there's a wrong or a right way here, there's just what you're used to. To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure if I completely understand your complaint - I almost exclusively use Windows and I'm not really sure what the Delete key does but is just 'reverse backspace'? I never use it.
Nobody said the Mac is the only operating system with keyboard shortcuts, so maybe you're replying to the wrong comment there.
The Delete key deletes the character to the right of the insertion point; the Backspace key deletes the character to the left. You must be wasting a lot of keystrokes!
A Delete key also deletes stuff; like E-mails, files... any currently-selected item in most applications. I don't "backspace" E-mails or other objects to delete them.
I guess I just don't delete stuff from left-to-right - most of the time I'm undoing a typo I've just typed, so backspace feel more appropriate. Otherwise decades of habit just has me put the cursor to the right of characters I want to remove.
Again, I don't think either is more inherently correct, there's just what you're used to.
Unfortunately, Apple has decided that Backspace IS "more correct." Everyone else has been providing both keys for decades.
If you do a lot of editing, and certainly programming, you quickly chafe at the lack of a Delete key. I've been using Karabiner on the Mac to remap F12 to be Delete, losing the Volume-up control in the process. Annoying, but worth it.
On a Mac keyboard layout, the key at the upper right of the main section is named delete. And that name alighns with how it's used across macOS: as the equivalent of the delete key on the PC layout.
The exception to that equivalence is in text editing where it behaves like backspace. But macOS doesn't ignore the desire to delete text in the other direction. fn+delete will perform a forward character delete.
A two-handed, unmarked key combo to delete a single character is a poor substitute for what has been a standard key on almost every other keyboard for decades.
Looking at a Macbook keyboard, regardless of what label Apple puts on it, you can see that it's missing either a Backspace key or a Delete key.
I can see this being useful for old MacBooks with little RAM but I'd never used it.
Closed apps running in background are like services. I do not need the window to be rendered in the background for messages or chat apps. I open them only when needed. Or having a large-ish apps I use on daily basis preloaded in compressed memory. It's just a sensible workflow.
Whether this app is for you or not, it must be appreciated that this is possible, and is what will distinguish 'real computers' from toy devices like iPad.
There was a time where Apple was trying to make iOS/iPad the future of (Apple) computing, but it could just never happen partly because while Apple may have lowered the floor on ease-of-use, they also significantly lowered the ceiling of functionality compared to macOS (or Windows). Completely eliminated the long-tail of possibility that people use Real Computers for.
iPads now have the same CPU as some Mac computers, yet they're still significantly held back by software limitations (and have been pretty much since day one).
Listening to John Siracusa talk about creating such utilities and it's a story of ever decreasing API features making tasks like interrogating and controlling the OS or other apps increasingly hard especially if you want to be blessed by inclusion in the platform app store. It's super risky to invest your time/money creating an app like this because the chance it is broken in the next OS update is so high.
I fully agree that it's what makes computers special and I am very frustrated by "security" being the reason I can't make the computer behave as I wish. So many 3rd party fixes or innovative ideas (e.g. industry changing game mods) wouldn't have happened without malware like tactics of patching dlls which I believe every OS vendor would like to make forever impossible.
Safe computing is essential but not at the cost of killing the golden goose of general purpose computing with full user control. I wish the focus was more on transparency and control of what software is doing on a system and not cutting it's legs off.
They dumb down iPads for the same reason they don’t allow a multiuser experience on iPad. They want you to buy another iPad or if you want a more capable device a Mac.
I have a few dozen apps set to quit after specific periods of time. This allows me to run/resume certain apps for a few hours (VLC, Figma), while others shut down only 10 minutes after I use them (Messages, Calculator).
It's not a lot given what you get for the money (easy app publishing on the App Store, call support with Apple engineers etc.).
But SwiftQuit's dev doesn't make money with the app so he didn't see the need to pay that money just to sign the app. An unsigned app downloaded from the dev's website is as good as a signed one.
Because Mac users close their apps when they are done with them.
If you have an app that with windows for things like documents, images, etc. When you finish one document and want to open a different document or create a new one, why should closing your first window also close the app. Do you then need to reopen the app to open the next document?
In Windows the window is the app. In Mac OS, the apps have windows. It’s just a different way of looking at things.
Back in 2010 when I got my first MacBook, the app not closing when the window closed was alien to me as someone who had only ever used Windows. But that discomfort only lasted a few months, and I grew to strongly prefer the distinction of “this app is running” and “this app is has a window open” + value the difference between Cmd-Q and Cmd-W.
I remember one OS update made the app closing behavior the default, and I had to go learn where the setting was to undo it; a subsequent OS backtracked on that. The distinction is less meaningful these days with NVME making apps launch much faster than spinning 2.5” drives, but stuff like Photoshop still has a long startup time.