Here is a simple question. If you can close and shut down System Settings by clicking on the little red dot in the top left hand corner…why does this not occur for all other apps?
I think you are saying that clicking the red dot closes the window and quits System Settings, while doing so in most other apps just closes the window? Correct?
There are a number of other apps, not many, which behave like this.
There appears to be a setting available to developers to enable this behavior (from Stack Exchange):
"Override the following method in NSApplicationDelegate (which normally returns NO):
-(BOOL)applicationShouldTerminateAfterLastWindowClosed:(NSapplication*)sender
{
return YES;
}
"
Thus the behavior is based on how the program was written.
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IIRC, this is a Mac legacy thing. Some programs are single window, which used to mean (and I’m going off a thing I heard John Siracusa explain, and I might be summarizing poorly) that the app would quit. You’ve closed the only given window an app could contain, so bye bye.
But if an app supported multiple windows, you can close the window without closing the app.
I think there is a bit more to it than this, because it was a) up to the developer and b) there was some consideration about how “simple” the app was when integrating this behaviour. My memory isn’t perfect on all this. So hopefully somebody can jump in and correct me.
However, I always think of it as single window app vs multi-window app behaviour.
This irks me because I feel some apps should be multi-window that are not, I.e. DaVinci Resolve.
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Historical reasons, mostly.
This whole thing reminds me of Multifinder and Desk Accessories, which if I remember correctly would quit when you clicked the “close window” — because they were only allowed to have one window. I think @snelly has it right.
But for macOS as it exists now, I’ve never heard a definitive rule about which apps are allowed to quit when you close the last window
I’ve dealt with enough Windows users to know that they are continually confused by this behavior (close window and quit are 2 separate commands), but I’d hate it if apps quit when I closed the last window. I have decades of the opposite experience, and switching it would be beyond frustrating. There are many times when I keep apps open but with no windows. Preview is a big one, since throughout my day I’m dipping into PDFs.
But also some big Adobe apps might stay open if I’m working on a project like a newsletter where I need InDesign to do the layout but Photoshop to process the photos. Photoshop stays open even when there’s no photo open. Closing it would be beyond tedious since it takes a ridiculously long time to launch these days. (Ridiculous in comparison to other apps, which are super speedy on the M-series Macs.)
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I agree. I like the extra control of having separate commands for them
In general, I agree. But there are some apps that I open, use, and then quit. For those I use a utility called Swift Quit.
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I’ve heard of that, but didn’t see the advantage over cmd-q
Fair enough.
It’s a free app that runs in the background and makes my Mac experience a little bit better.
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All that matters is what works for you, regardless of what works for anyone else. I’ve had people tell me they don’t understand why I use Amphetamine when you can run Caffeinate from the terminal.
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I think this whole issue is made more confusing because it’s not consistent.
For example, to harp on DaVinci Resolve again, because what the fart is wrong with that app: when I open it, it shows me a file pane. I click New or open an existing project. This window disappears, and the project opens.
When I close the project, a good Mac app would show me the file picker again. Not Resolve! It just quits.
This stupid, dumb, not-Mac-like behaviour from a pro app probably confuses some people (like OP) even further. It just plain old annoys me, and they should fix it.
I don’t think there is really anything to worry about here. If the app doesn’t quit when you close the window it really doesn’t hurt to leave it running as the system will swap it out of RAM if the space is needed.
Back when Lion came out Apple attempted a paradigm shift from being app centric to document centric. When you were finished with a document in, say, Pages, you would close it with ⌘W and basically never use ⌘Q. If you didn’t close it it would close automatically when you shut down or logged off only to be reopened when you logged back in. The changes also got rid of “Save As” instead giving Duplicate and then save the duplicate with a new name.
This new paradigm was controversial, and was handled inconsistently in Apples own apps and ignored by many 3rd party apps. Personally, I thought it was a great idea at the time.
Just wanted to say I really enjoyed that post (even though I would have strongly disagreed with parts of it when using Lion). You’re a clear and cogent writer!