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>Closing all document windows doesn't close the app I love this about macos. Its consistent: eg, you close documents with cmd+w one by one, until they're all g

>Closing all document windows doesn't close the app I love this about macos. Its consistent: eg, you close documents with cmd+w one by one, until they're all gone. Then you press cmd+n to create a new document. This is consistent and logical. On other OS, cmd/ctrl+w does something different if you're closing the last document. Another example of the inconsistency it causes is in browsers when you close the last tab and it asks you "closing the browser will cancel the in-progress download, are you sure?" and so you have to keep an arbitrary tab/document open to keep background downloads going. Also in a practical sense it is useful for slow-starting applications to be running and ready to load a document without needing to keep open a blank document. The equivalent behaviour on other systems is achieved by MDI applications which are much less elegant IMO. Or for apps that have to keep running but don't have a specific window to show, they implement something similar to mac anyway where the application appears in the system tray.

Steltek 4y ago
Familiar != consistent. Mac is app-centric, all other mainstream OS's are window-centric, and they're all internally consistent. If you grew up with one system, the other feels alien and broken. For example, on MacOS, alt-tab not cycling through the list of windows feels so absurdly broken to me that I don't even bother trying to use that shortcut anymore. Focusing apps that don't even have a visual presence on screen is also a source of heightened frustration.
- ubercow13 4y ago
  When keyboard shortcuts that control window/document lifetime sometimes also control app lifetime depending on context, that is an internal inconsistency in the abstraction. Familiarity can help you deal with it just fine, but I don't think I was confusing the two.
kitsunesoba 4y ago
“Magic windows” is something that bites me fairly often under Windows/Linux. “Well I’m done with this page, might as well close the browser wi— oh wait that’s right it’s downloading something.” I wish there were Linux distributions that took an app-centric approach similar to that of macOS. It just gels with my brain better.

Steltek 4y ago

Familiar != consistent. Mac is app-centric, all other mainstream OS's are window-centric, and they're all internally consistent. If you grew up with one system, the other feels alien and broken. For example, on MacOS, alt-tab not cycling through the list of windows feels so absurdly broken to me that I don't even bother trying to use that shortcut anymore. Focusing apps that don't even have a visual presence on screen is also a source of heightened frustration.

ubercow13 4y ago
When keyboard shortcuts that control window/document lifetime sometimes also control app lifetime depending on context, that is an internal inconsistency in the abstraction. Familiarity can help you deal with it just fine, but I don't think I was confusing the two.

kitsunesoba 4y ago

“Magic windows” is something that bites me fairly often under Windows/Linux. “Well I’m done with this page, might as well close the browser wi— oh wait that’s right it’s downloading something.” I wish there were Linux distributions that took an app-centric approach similar to that of macOS. It just gels with my brain better.