Mac OS X: One of Mac's most confusing features is the red close button, which you think would shut down an application but often doesn't. RedQuits is a free utility that closes applications when. You don't even have to write an action method for this purpose. The 'File's Owner' of the main nib is the NSApplication instance representing the running application itself, and it has a method terminate: which terminates the app. So, just connect your button to the terminate: method of 'File's Owner'. You can see that the 'Quit' entry of the menu bar provided by the Interface builder is. On your Mac, most of the information is displayed in windows, including Finder windows and app windows.

If you are new to Mac, then the uses for the red, yellow and green window buttons at the top left corner of every Mac window may not be obvious. The red button closes the window. The yellow button minimizes the window, placing it in the Dock. The green button can either take the window into full screen mode, or maximize the window to its logical size.

Check out A Beginner’s Guide to the Red, Yellow and Green Window Buttons at YouTube for closed captioning and more options.

Mac Red Button Close App Store

Video Transcript: If you're new to Mac you may be wondering about the exact functionality of the three colored buttons that appear at the top left corner of just about every window you'll ever see on the Mac. These are the red, yellow, and green buttons, sometimes referred to as the traffic light buttons. Sometimes the middle button is referred to as orange rather than yellow although official Apple documentation always calls it yellow. So, what do these do?Well, the first one is pretty obvious. It closes the window. Now modern applications automatically save the document when you close the window. So you can close a window at any time and it will just close. If you're working on an older document and you've made some changes since the last time you saved you may be prompted to save the document before it closes. Some apps, where there's just one big window and it's all the app has, if you close it the entire app actually quits. Now let's skip over to the green button. The green button does two different things. One thing it does is to take the app full screen. As a matter of fact take that particular window full screen. So I will click on it and you will see now it's full screen. Everything else is gone except this one window in this app. If I want to get the menu bar back, or even those colored buttons, just move the cursor to the top of the screen. You can see the menu bar comes back, the tool bar comes back, and there are those buttons with a green button there that changes a little bit to indicate that I can click to go back to the way it was before. Now when you go full screen you can actually use Control up arrow to see what you've got in terms of things full screen. I've got the desktop, which is what I was working before, and a screen called Pages and I can jump to either one. So I can go back to the desktop there. I can also use Control right arrow and left arrow to go back and forth between them. So, of course, to get out of this and exit full screen, I press the green button again. You can also use the green button with the Option key held down. What that does is it will change to a plus + symbol and I click on it and enlarges the window. Now it doesn't enlarge it to fill the screen. It enlarges it to fill the screen as much as it needs so everything fits in place. So here in this Pages document if I expand the window a bit you can see I've got these margins here on the left and right side of the page. There's nothing in those margins. So it won't expand the window to the point where I need that space. You'll see I'll do it again. Option and click the green button and it collapses it instead of expands it. So now if I were to go and zoom in where the document is 300%, now if I click plus you can see it expands it to fill all the space because the document itself, the margins, are off to the left or right. I can zoom out and you can see now, now I've got that extra space there. So basically it's a logical kind of function. It will expand the window as much as it needs but not more than it needs. Now Option and clicking a second time will return the window to the size you had it before. So if you had it this size, Option, click green enlarges it. Option click green returns it to the size you had. So you can toggle back and forth.Now what about the yellow button. Well, the yellow button minimizes the window or puts it in the Dock is what it really does. So you can see a list of windows here in the Dock and I can click to bring it back. Get rid of it. It's just a handy way to get a window out of the way and then be able to bring it back pretty easily.Now what happens if you have more than one window. Let's have two windows open here in Pages. I can use the Option key and it will affect all windows. So you can see both windows went there into the Dock when I held down the Option key and clicked the yellow button. If I didn't hold down the Option key only one goes in. It's the same thing for, say, close. If I were to hold down the Option key both windows close instead of just the one window.
When you click the red button at the top left corner of a window on a Mac, you close that window. But sometimes this also quits the app entirely. There is a logic behind this, based on how the app operates. Apps that allow multiple windows for multiple documents usually only use the red button to close a window. But apps that normally operate with a single window and have no other reason to stay open, will quit.

Check out When Does the Mac Red Button Quit an App and When Does It Just Close a Window? at YouTube for closed captioning and more options.

Video Transcript: So every once in awhile I get somebody asking about what actually happens when you click the red close button to close a window in an application on the Mac. The confusion comes from the fact that sometimes this seems to quit the app and sometimes it doesn't quit the app. So, for instance, here I am in Safari and if I click the red button I can see Safari is still the app that's running. I can create a new window in Safari. I'm still looking at Safari menu items here at the top. I'm still in Safari. But then other apps don't act this way.Here's the Contacts app. You can see I'm running Contacts. Here's the Contacts window. If I click the red button here Contacts actually closes. The entire application quits. Why is there a difference between how some apps act when you click the red button and other apps? So there is kind of a logic that apps play by when determining what happens when you click that red button. It has to do with, what I call, single window apps. Whether or not an app really consists of a single window or whether there are multiple windows containing multiple documents used by the app.So, for instance, Contacts is a single window app. There's one window here that shows you your contacts and you can go and click on different ones and it displays the contact to the right. It's a single window. When you click the red button you close that single window so it quits. Other apps have multiple windows usually because you can have multiple Docks open.For instance the easiest way to demonstrate this is an app that undoubtedly shows you one window per document. Here's Pages and we create a window that has this one document in it. If I create a new document it's in a second window. I have two windows right now running in Pages. Now you would imagine that when you click the red button you don't want Pages to quit because you have another document open. You may have three or four documents open. You certainly don't want the entire app to Quit just because you closed one window or one document. So it goes to follow that they should be consistent and even when there's one window left when you close that one window the app stays open. After all you may be closing that document in order to simply go ahead and open another one. So the app doesn't quit. You have to go to the Menu and Quit or use Command Q to actually quit the app.So we can look at other apps and see how they work. For instance, Notes seems to be a single window app. Sure enough if I click the red button there Notes quits. Now if we go to something like TextEdit that has multiple windows. There's a document. There's another document. Of course whichever one of those I close it's not going to quit the app. I close the last one and it still doesn't close the app. I actually have to Quit it by itself.Then there are apps that kind of fall in-between. Sometimes you can rationalize why they don't work this way. So you have iTunes. iTunes seems to be a single window app. After all there is no way for me to open up a second main iTunes window. But if I click the red button it doesn't quit. Well, this kind of makes sense because first of all there are two windows that you can have. That you can switch between. So I could go to Window and open the iTunes window or I can switch to MiniPlayer and bring that up. That's a second window and if I close this first window the MiniPlayer stays open. If I close the MiniPlayer it actually automatically opens the main window. So it's kind of a little bit beyond a single window app. Plus the fact that of course if I'm playing music in iTunes and I want to close the window to get it out of the way I don't want iTunes to quit because the music will stop playing. So it makes sense in that case.There are some definite exceptions though. In Calendar you've got what looks like a single window app but if you click the red button it doesn't quit Calendar. I can go to Window, Calendar. Now you can rationalize this a little bit because there is something called the Availability Panel. You bring that up and that's a kind of useful thing all on its own. So closing the main Calendar window to have your Availability Panel open it does kind of make sense. It might be the reasoning why Calendar doesn't behave like a single window app.Of course Safari is an app where you definitely, very often, have more than one window open. So even though these technically aren't documents, they're webpages, they're like documents. So you close one window, close another window, you're still in Safari. It's very likely when you close a window in Safari that you may decide you want to open another one right away. You don't want to Quit the app and have to go and restart it. Whereas in some of these apps, like in Contacts, you're not going to go and say well I want to go and view another contact. Let me close this window just to go back to the same window. If you think of it in terms of that rule then it actually makes sense. So that's why Contacts quits like that. There are other apps too. News is like that as well. There's a single window for News. If I click to close that then News Quits because it wouldn't make sense to close the News window only to reopen it again to go to another location.So various apps do various different things. For the most part there's some logic behind it. It seems like in all cases when an app can deal with multiple windows and multiple documents clicking the red button will not Quit the app. It seems like in most cases when it looks like it's a one window app clicking the red button will Quit the app. There are a few exceptions and these exceptions kind of can be rationalize a little bit to make sense. So I hope that explains it. It really doesn't change much about how you use your Mac. But it's interesting to look at.

Mac Red Button Close Application