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Comment by phito | Hacker News Reader

Is it a Mac thing to keep applications open? I usually close mine as soon as I'm not actively using them

Yes I think it is, In Mac OS it has always been explicit that an application ≠ window (with only a few exceptions such as the calculator app). Closing an app window must not quit the application.

This is reinforced by the menu bar which is always at the top of the screen rather than attached to an application window.

Why is that? I'm a gnome/Linux user who had to switch to Mac M3 for work.

Macos feels.... Half baked. I don't understand why apps should run after I close the window.

I'm also annoyed that I can't type the window I want when viewing all windows. If I open mission control, it takes 3 clicks on the dock to run the app. (Un-do mission control, focus the dock, run the app.)

That being said, I do like stage manager, I try to size my windows 90% so I can see the background windows.

An app is not a document in Mac OS (and other operating systems). Therefore it is logical that closing the document will not quit the application. Treating all applications as document is a flawed model which often breaks down as is made obvious when opening multiple documents in a MDI system.

It's even traceable all the way back to the user interface research at Xerox which Apple took and went with because it worked so well. Researchers such as Donald Norman also concluded that MDI interface were much worse at common actions such as drag-and-drop and standardised interface controls.

The menu bar is at the top because it’s always been there, but moreover it makes it easier to click menus as you only have to flick your cursor to Y=0 and then move it in the X dimension laterally instead of having to find a small target on a window in the middle of the screen. On other OSs it’s more common to maximize windows.

Distinguishing between processes (applications) and windows just makes sense.

For example say you download something in your browser, then you open a new window, then you close the original window. If windows = processes then closing the original window should cancel the download (because you killed that process), but we all know that would be nonsensical. So user intuition is that there is one main process and multiple windows.

Apple does allow for closing the window to kill the process. However only if there is one main window, such as the calculator app. If there’s multiple windows possible (such as in a text editor or web browser), then closing all windows does not quit the application because the user may want to close a window and then open a new window (e.g. open document or new document).

It’s an optimization from the early days where launching application was slow but task switching to an application in virtual memory was quick.

The benefits seem less obvious with modern hardware like SSD’s, but it is still a net benefit once you’re used to it.

The Mac could originally only run one major application at a time - although you did have 'desk accessories'. Andy Hertzfeld relatively soon wrote 'Switcher', a hack to allow multiple applications, which was released some time in early 1985. That wasn't virtual memory, it was real physical memory. The Mac wouldn't officially get virtual memory until System 7.

A more official solution wouldn't come until MultiFinder in 1987, and that was originally limited to one foreground and one background application. Wikipedia says:

"When an application is activated, all of its windows are brought forward as a single layer. This approach is necessary for backward compatibility with many of the windowing data structures that were already documented."

"With the release of System 7 [in 1991], the MultiFinder extension was integrated with the operating system, and it remains so in Mac OS 8 and Mac OS 9. However, the integration into the OS does nothing to fix MultiFinder's inherent idiosyncrasies and disadvantages."

By the time that OS X came out in 2001, the menu bar being at the top of the screen, and switching with the current app, was fully entrenched. After all, OS X initially had no native apps, still emulating the old OS 9 environment, and Carbon (essentially recompiling a "classic" Mac OS 9 app with relatively minor changes) would be the dominant API for some time too. Indeed Carbon wasn't removed until macOS 10.15 Catalina in late 2019.

The macOS ideal (and arguably it’s somewhat correct) is that you shouldn’t have to think about it at all. You should be thinking about the documents/content of what you’re doing, not the internals of the OS.

The closest they’ve gotten is iOS itself where apps sleep forever without your interaction.

In the very early days of macOS before becoming a Unix it was actually noticeable because for ordinary people they apps they would use would always be around, and it was still faster to swap in running apps than load a closed app from disk.

If you want to type the window, something like alfred / raycast / spotlight search invoked by keyboard can help.

My gnome workflow was: * I have many windows open * I press a key (super) to get the misson-control like overview. I type in "Firefox" * It will run the app if it's not already running, or switch to it.

If there's something that can emulate that, and... Not be a hacky work around.. then I'm all ears

Cmd + spacebar opens the Spotlight Search

That’s how it works on macOS. Command-space (or whatever way you want to trigger Spotlight) then type Firefox and it will bring it to the front, or launch it if it’s not running. No workarounds or third-party software needed.

>Macos feels.... Half baked. I don't understand why apps should run after I close the window.

Because that's what Steve Jobs decided and he was never wrong. /s

The Apple philosophy always was "we know what's best for our users, it's our way or the highway, deal with it".

I think the rule was (and probably still is) that closing a window in a document-based application keeps the app open but closing a window in a utility application (where you usually would have only one window anyway) closes the application.

Back in the day, there was this idea of some applications being "document" centered while others revolved around an "activity". On average you only want one instance of your calculator application open as it's what you use to do math and having two or three might be confusing. On the other hand, when you use Microsoft Word there's really one window per a document and having five Word documents open at once make sense.

This is another idea that has been somewhat lost over time. I believe the way it works now is that you can choose to have your application close when it's last window is closed, or not. That seems a reasonable compromise, it's never been clear to me why you'd want an application like Word with no window to continue running.

I think it's less of a Mac thing, and more of a RAM thing.

More ram than you anticipate is like extra lung capacity and working memory. Also an extra year or two out of the laptop. Combined with horsepower it can be an advantage.

Instant switching of apps or screens can have it's benefits, but needs to be managed.

Similar to having more tabs open than normal. Tools like Firefox Spaces are invaluable for switching between multiple client projects.

Waiting for apps to open/load/close can add up significantly throughout a day depending on the variety.

Why would it be "a Mac thing"? I only ever close FireFox when updating the system and I'm on Linux.

Not really, I would guess more of a personal workflow. I just have the same set of apps open the whole time, regardless of OS. Browser, test browser, code editor, terminal, chat, music player. That's enough windows to cause placement issues.

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