8 ms·
X to Close – The origins of the use of [x] in UI design. (2014)
- signaru 3y agoBack in the early 2000s, I had a Windows 3.1 386 machine to myself as my family was using the new PC at the time. The glaring difference to me was the missing "X" so I programmed a small window that would dock on the corner of the active window and provide an X close button (as well as maximize, minimize as the real ones were now obscured by that window). It was very hacky-spaghetti Visual Basic code using whatever I can figure out from WinAPI documentations I could find and I was too inexperienced back then. But it worked. My older brother didn't realize the "X" wasn't supposed to exist and it even ended up getting bundled with someone's Calmira fork. Good times.
- midoridensha 3y agoThis headline is deceptive: it starts with "X to Close". When I first read this, I thought this means that X (formerly Twitter) was closing. Then my urge to cheer loudly was suddenly quashed when I read the rest of the headline.
- ensocode 3y agoThe twitter re-branding really makes sense to me now.
- mmcconnell1618 3y agoIt's interesting that in the context of a pirate map, X, marks the spot of the treasure to be found while in another context, X, means close the window or "incorrect." I wonder which one will be most accurate for Twitter's new branding?
- ognyankulev 3y agoI can confidently say that Elon's X won't become Japan's WeChat.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Sharlin 3y agoThe left-hand title bar button in Windows 3.x was not a close button, mind, it opened the title bar dropdown menu (which was changed to a right-click context menu in Windows 95).
- FreeFull 3y agoIt did however close the window if you double-clicked it, which carried over into newer versions of Windows too.
- floxy 3y agoCame across this interesting take: > When I see an "X" in the corner of an image I see on screen, it feels as though clicking on it will make it go away. Now, clicking on an "X" is supposed to feel like a way to take me onto The Website Formerly Known as Twitter. But my instinct is to click when something is annoying me, not to click when I want more. https://althouse.blogspot.com/2023/07/a-problem-with-x.html https://althouse.blogspot.com/2023/07/a-problem-with-x.html
- MontyCarloHall 3y ago>Batsu (x) is the symbol for incorrect, and can represent false, bad, wrong or attack, while maru (o) means correct, true, good, whole, or something precious. Another familiar example of batsu/maru is in the Playstation controller design, where maru and batsu are used for yes and no. Interestingly, ╳ is no/◯ is yes only on Playstation games released in Japan. For games released everywhere else in the world, it's reversed (which I always found odd, since I think of X as a pretty universal symbol for "no"). Previous HN discussion speculating on reasons for the switch here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8171430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8171430
- ralferoo 3y agoI actually found this pretty confusing myself as the first PlayStation console I had was a PS3 that I bought in Hong Kong that had the Japanese button layout. Some time later, I was using this primarily with Linux under OtherOS and I bought a UK PS3 to play games with. It took me a long time to get used to the swapped buttons. Interestingly, I later became a games developer and discovered that on the developer units you can change the O/X to confirm/cancel mapping in order to be able to test for correct behaviour in both locales, but as a frustrated player who was still getting them mixed up, I never understood why that option wasn't just available on the retail consoles as well. > which I always found odd, since I think of X as a pretty universal symbol for "no" As for this, I think in the UK and maybe most of the English speaking world (and maybe also most other countries), people are conditioned to using an x to mark their selection when confronted with several choices, or a tick mark for true if there's only one choice (sometimes people tick checkboxes, but this usually extends past the edge of the box and can easily get messy) but is seems culturally in Japan they've always used the circle instead. Similarly, using O for off has been a convention on power switches for a long time (again, at least in the UK), so it also makes sense as a cancel button. Conversely, there's also use good precedent for X to indicate wrong in the UK, but I think it's only really when there's a choice between cross and tick. I guess for the original PlayStation, it was always intended that O was confirm and X was cancel, and only got changed for non-Asia when the international Sony offices complained about it being culturally confusing.
- m_mueller 3y ago
- bradrn 3y ago> No [x] to close these 1980's text editors either. X was commonly used to delete characters in-line, but not to close the program. Not quite true. In Vim, :x means ‘save and close buffer’, and is a synonym for :wq. (Not sure if this was present in earlier Vi or not, but I believe it was.)
- icedchai 3y agoWhen you're in vi (or vim) normal mode, x does delete characters.
- irdc 3y agoInterestingly, ArthurOS (what would eventually be renamed to RISC OS) version 1.2 from 1987 already used an [x] to close (https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/riscos12 https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/riscos12) thus predating NeXTSTEP.
- gjvc 3y agoApropos this sort of thing: Around that time, one of the employees of Acornsoft took the RISC OS "icon bar" concept with him to Microsoft, where it became the "task bar" in Windows 95. Source: ex-Acornsoft employee whom I talk to at meetups from time to time. I have mentioned to him that the icon bar launched many careers, not just programs :-)
- hunters_laptop 3y agoI heard that actually american copycat from japanese culture
- bmacho 3y agoAnother example from 1987, England RISC OS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3N2FF9h-aL0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3N2FF9h-aL0 It sounds wild that the X == denial originates from Japan.
- brookst 3y agoFirst impression reading the headline was that Musk is even more impetuous than I’d thought.
- Garlef 3y agoThis is another reason why the "X" rebrand of twitter is not only a good idea: I've already pressed the "X" logo to close the window.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- webwielder2 3y agoNeXTSTEP ended up being the visual foundation and the actual foundation of the two major operating systems that it had sought to supplant in the first place.
- failuser 3y agoSo were did NeXT get it? Before that I assume “x” was a metaphor for crossing out the page of text or paragraph marking it invalid. That is probably not as universal. Windows 3 was using “x” in checkboxes as well, I wonder if switching to checkmarks is connected to putting “x” on the “close window” button.
- kridsdale1 3y agoThe truth may have died with Steve.
- sixthDot 3y agoThe big question is: why do people still put a "Quit" MenuItem in their File menu ?
- mcpackieh 3y agoAt this point, putting it anywhere else would make people even more confused.
- RodgerTheGreat 3y agoFor many applications, especially on MacOS, closing a window and exiting the application are not the same operation.
- pasc1878 3y agoIn MacOS quit is not in the File menu. It is in the menu which is the name of the application, along with About, Preferences/Settings, Hide, Services. The File menu has Close.
- fredoralive 3y agoPedantically, Quit was in the File menu in classic Mac OS. The application menu is was added in Mac OS X.
- pasc1878 3y agoAh I came to macOS from NeXT so I have always seen it that way.
- ksherlock 3y agoBut classic Mac OS did have an X close button. Sure, it's a square in the screen shots but what happens when you click on it?
- CharlesW 3y agoI'm not sure if there's a name for it, but it's not an X. You can try it yourself here: https://infinitemac.org/1988/System%206.0 https://infinitemac.org/1988/System%206.0 The “x” during hover was apparently added in MacOS X.
- wolfgang42 3y agoThe pressed state for the close box was a sort of starburst thing, not an X. (Possibly you’re thinking of checkboxes, which were squares that got crossed out when they were checked.)
- RodgerTheGreat 3y agoThis: https://i.imgur.com/rjfxoRy.gif https://i.imgur.com/rjfxoRy.gif
- n3storm 3y agoReading artile with this Fwm4 theme https://www.xfce-look.org/p/1211669/ https://www.xfce-look.org/p/1211669/ and saying "really? atari? maru?"
- tyingq 3y agoOne of my favorite fumbles from Google's AMP project. For a while, if you navigated to an AMP site from the carousel...The [X] on the AMP-injected header would send them back to Google, rather than dismiss the header.
- kridsdale1 3y agoThat doesn’t sound like a fumble. That that sounds like a successful growth hack.
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoBunch of previous discussion from 2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8171340 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8171340
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoIncluding a screenshot of NeXTSTEP in 1988 with an [x] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8171375 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8171375
- 3cats-in-a-coat 3y agoFrom now on, clicking [x] anywhere in an UI will open Twitter.
- sebastiennight 3y ago"One weird little trick to get a 69,420% traffic increase on your social media website"
- amelius 3y agoThere is a huge difference between X and ×. The former has angles != 90 degrees, unlike the latter.
- junglistguy 3y ago[dead]
- shaunxcode 3y agoWell the song “straight edge” by Minor Threat and the subsequent movement happened in 1981 and they used the X to indicate they abstained from drink/drugs (closing them down as it were). Perhaps that is where it came from??
- evaneykelen 3y agoSurprising that the article doesn’t mention the word eXit.
- tezza 3y agoGood suggestion My personal conjecture is that the Close action had the purpose to kill off your graphical work at that point. So death for that portion… Death often being depicted in cartoons (inc. black and white) with an X over both eyelids
- hawski 3y agoSeeing "kill off" and "cartoons" reminds me of a skull and crossbones as the symbol of pirates - pillage and kill. Crossbones make an X symbol.
- furyofantares 3y agoYeah, when we got Windows 95 I taught this to my parents: to exit you "x it".
- bArray 3y ago> And Linux GUI’s started to use the [x] symbol only after the release of Windows 95. Which? The website linked to is hardly comprehensive [1]. There's literally tonnes of X window managers pre-1993 [2]. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20160516213015/http://whiteandnoisy.org:80/linux.html https://web.archive.org/web/20160516213015/http://whiteandno... [2] https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Guide_to_X11/Window_Managers https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Guide_to_X11/Window_Managers