“Closing an application window” sounds so… formal. In fact, I never say it. I’ve begun to follow the lead of my kids, who say “X’ing out.” But I’m led to wonder if the rest of the world uses this phrase as well. And if not that, what?
Some variant of “close the window”. Could be as short as “close” or as long as “close the window that says Microsoft Word on it”.
X’ing out seems too casual, so clearly I’m coming to this from the opposite end…
I usually say “close the window” or “close Word” or whatever. But now that you mention it, I think I do say “X out of that” on occasion, generally with less-technical people who say it to me first.
“Close the Window” sounds fine to me. After all, there are multiple ways to close a window, and using the “X” is just the most common.
In many data-entry type applications there is an OK and a CANCEL button which are the proper ways to close the form as it leaves no doubt if you want to save your edits as well.
‘close the window’ or ‘close [specific application]’ or some variant of those. I often have to do this over the phone for people - I think abstracting it to something like ‘X out of that’ would just confuse them (and some of them really are that easily confused - the invasion of computers into the office means there are still people out there who are in charge of a computer, who would not have been trusted to use scissors unsupervised before)
So are you just closing a window or are you also quitting the app? The action varies depending on whether you are closing the last window of the app.
On the Mac, closing all windows does NOT quit the application. You need to select Quit from the menu or press Command-Q. This was one of the things it took me a while to get used to when I switched from Windows.
I say “close the window” or “close the application”. I cringe when I hear “X out”; not really sure why.
Some windows apps do this as well. I usually just say “close [app]” but will occasionally say “close out (of) [app].”
You can also say “exit the application”.
In the Win32API, which is a library of subroutines that are part of Windows and are the functions that a program calls in order to get Windows to do things, the function that closes a piece of software is Application.Exit(), so “exit the application” seems to have a kind of official status.
I think it wouldn’t be too hard to confuse “closing a window” with minimizing it, because both emphasize the rectangular screen region associated with a running application, and making it disappear from the screen. So, I don’t like the phrase “close a window” to mean exiting the program.
I say ‘‘X Out.’’ It confuses old people when I’m trying to help them with their computers, though.
I’ve been known to instruct people to “blow that window away”. More common is “get out of that”. This backfired once back in Win 3.1 days when my stepdaughter asked me how to “get out of” the C:\ prompt. :smack:
>I say ‘‘X Out.’’ It confuses old people when I’m trying to help them with their computers, though.
Yeah, now that you mention it, I wouldn’t know what you meant.
The first computer I actually worked on professionally couldn’t even save files, until we bought a casette deck to plug into it. Turn it on, and before the picture tube would warm up, the CPU (a Z-80) was ready to go, with firmware BASIC. Type your program and your data into the memory. With 16 kB shared between program and data, that was a lot of typing. Write any notes you want about how your program looked, so you could type it in again and get it to be the same. These notes, by the way, are on paper. To X out of this, you’d turn the switch off. It was a real advancement on the computers of just a couple years earlier, which only had toggle switches and LEDs on the front.
The .NET framework is looking niftier all the time.