Difference between closing and minimising?

Use minimize when you don't want to lose what's in a current window, but you do want to get it off your desktop for the moment because you need something else that's there. So it's minimized to the dock. For example, you're in Safari, but you're working in Word too, and you need space for a couple of Word's windows, so you put Safari into the background by minimizing it.

You close a window when you're done with it. You don't need what's in it anymore, but you're not done with the program that created it. Say you're in Word editing a document, you print it, you save it, and now you're done with it. So you close it. But unlike Windows, that doesn't make it quit Word, because you were actually going to work on another document, and if Word closed you'd have to launch it all over again.

When you're done with a window, you close it. When you're done with an application, you quit it. When you want to temporarily move a window off your desktop, you minimize it.

You can also hide an application's windows using command-H. It's still running, but all its windows are gone until you click on the application's dock icon again.

Hope that helps.

Pagemakers2 wrote:

I am new to Macs and on Windows 'close' actually closes and quits the app and 'minimise', err, minimises it to the task bar.

On a Mac close and minimise seem to do roughly the same thing. Close does not shut down the
app, quit does!

I understand your confusion - I think you understand the difference between closing and minimizing a window, the problem is clicking the "x" button in the upper left. With some applications, clicking that closes the window but doesn't quit the application. With other apps, clicking the button closes the window and quits the program. It's one of the first things that caught me by surprise when I switched from Windows four years ago. I now make it a habit to invoke "quit ..." from the app's menu when I want to terminate it, unless I happen to remember how a particular app behaves when I click the "x" button.

For most applications, closing a window will not quit the application. The exceptions are generally settings sorts of things, where there really is only one possible window, and once you've made your settings adjustments, you'd expect to leave the settings app. For example, System Preferences. When you're done making changes and close the window, you probably don't have any more system preferences to set and you wouldn't be choosing to work on a new document. So it makes sense for the System Prefs app to actually quit.