Thoughts on quitting and window controls
Florian Diesch
diesch at spamfence.net
Wed Apr 7 10:17:40 UTC 2010
Jonathan Blackhall <johnny.one.eye at gmail.com> writes:
> It's very confusing for me when I click the big 'X' in my window controls,
> only to find that the application I was attempting to close has since been
> minimized to my system try (or notification area or its respective indicator
> applet or wherever it goes instead of quitting). Examples of programs with
> this behavior include Rhythmbox and Empathy in the default install. To me,
> the 'X' signifies closing and quitting the application.
As far as I know it has always been "Close this window".
> I can only assume that developers' theories behind this (which is definitely
> not a problem unique to Ubuntu) stem from them telling themselves that no
> one would actually want to Quit their application. "What they *really* mean
> to do is close the window, but keep the application running silently. So
> I'll just save them the trouble of accidentally quitting by changing the
> function of that 'X' button." I just dislike the fact that it sends mixed
> signals. After all, if I click 'X' in Firefox or in gEdit or in a whole
> host of other applications, I'm quitting and completely closing it.
In Firefox and gEdit clicking the "X" means "Close this windows", not
"Quit this app" - just try it with multiple windows open.
> Why must this be different in Rhythmbox?
Think about Rhythmbox as some kind of service running in the
background. The window is just a user interface for that service that
you can close if you don't need it, without stopping the service.
Florian
--
Simple dict-like Python API for GConf:
<http://www.florian-diesch.de/software/easygconf/>
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