When Should You Close, Minimize, Hide or Quit?

When you want to get a document or window out of the way, should you close it, minimize it, or just hide or quit the app? Take a look at these four options and see which would work better for you.


Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's talk about the different options you have when you want to get a window on your Mac out of the way.
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So when you're done with a document or a window that you were using in an App and you want to get it out of the way you've got many options. For instance you can Close the window. You can minimize it. You can Hide the entire app or you can Quit the entire app. So let's take a look at the advantages and disadvantages to each.
So for instance here I've got two Pages windows open. I'm working on a two page document. Let's say I'm not going to be using this one in the immediate future so I'll want to get it out of the way. One thing I can do is simply Close it. If I go up to the red dot at the top left corner and click that or choose File, Close or simply Command W then it closes that document. There are a lot of advantages to doing this and a few disadvantages. I think the main advantage is that it is the cleanest if you don't think you're going to be using that document in the near future. You don't ever have to go back to it to close it so you're done. But if you're wrong about that and you need to reopen it it's not that hard. For instance, in Pages here you can go to File, and then Open Recent and it should be the first one there at the top. You could also use App Expose which has a default keyboard shortcut of Control and Down Arrow and then you should see it here at the bottom left and be able to get back to it. You can find it in a variety of other places like the Apple Menu under Recent Items, for instance. Or if you go to the Dock and click and hold the app you should see it under the Recent Documents right here and you can open it that way.
So it is fairly easy to get back to a document even if you've closed it. However, sometimes if you're dealing with a large project or graphic apps or something like that and it is a massive file it could take a few seconds to open which is a disadvantage. It could also be a disadvantage if you're talking about a window here in Safari. If you were to close this window, I've got all these tabs open, and the window is just gone. But even in Safari there is, under the History Menu, a Reopen Last Closed Window option and you could bring it all back.
Now there is one option you should know about for closing windows in document apps like Pages. If you go into System Settings and you go to Desktop & Dock look down under Windows & Apps. You'll see an option here for Ask to Keep Changes When Closing Document. Having that turned Off makes it really easy to close a document. I can make a change, I've got a few lines here, and I could simply Command W to close a document. It's automatically saved and those lines that I added there are still there. However if you switch this to On and then you go to close a document where you've made some changes like that then you could see it is going to ask you if you want to save or not. You may like this option better but it does add an extra step when you want to close a document.
One last thing about closing windows is it does have virtually no clutter. It allows you to remain in the document, so in this case in Pages and I've got another window open so I don't want to Quit Pages, but now I have no clutter. There's nothing to clean up later on. The document isn't hanging out in the Dock or as a hidden window or anything.
So the next option is to Minimize. You can do that by clicking the yellow button here or going to Window, Minimize, Command M is the keyboard shortcut for this. When you do what typically happens is it disappears into the Dock. If you go to the Dock you actually see it as an icon here on the right side. You can click it to bring it back. That app works if the app is visible or not. Being able to see that list of minimized windows in the Dock could be an advantage. But also could create a lot of clutter. There are some people that like it either way. Now if you go to System Settings there is a setting for that as well. Also in Desktop and Dock. If you look for Minimize Windows in Application Icon you can turn that On. Now if I minimize it will not add an icon to the Dock. It is minimized into the application icon. It doesn't create anything new there in the Dock at all. If I click and Hold I could see it here in the List of windows. It has a diamond next to it and I can bring it back that way. I could also, of course, just bring it back by going to the window menu and selecting it there or if I were to use Down Arrow or App Expose I would see it here just like it was a recent document.
Since you're not technically closing the document it has the advantage in that it might be a little faster if it is a massive document. It also remembers the state of the document a little bit better. Now I'm not talking about actually the changes you made in the document. I'm talking about things like, say, the Undo state of what you've got. So, if I were to type some lines here, like this, and then I can Undo to go backwards. I can Shift Command Z to Redo. Both of these are here under the Edit Menu like that. But, if I were to close the document and then go and reopen it again I can't Undo. The Undo history is lost. So that is an example of some things you loose when you close a document as opposed to keeping it open and minimizing it. A big downsize to minimizing is using the App Switcher doesn't bring it back. So if I use the App Switcher to go to System Settings here and then go back to Pages notice that document doesn't come back. Only the visible windows are there. So if you minimize something and then you want to get back to it the App Switcher is not going to do it. I can't switch from one app to another and get those windows back. I have to go here in the Dock and select it that way or click on it on the right side of the Dock if I've got it minimized to there. Also, the window switcher, Command and then the backtick key which on US keyboards is above Tab will not switch to minimized windows. It only switches to windows that are fully visible. So here I've got two fully visible windows and I can switch between them. But that didn't work when this one was minimized.
Now another option you've got is to Hide instead of minimizing. So hiding is simply going to the main application icon here and choosing Hide, Command H, is almost always the shortcut for that and now Hides the entire application. The big advantage to this is you can use the App Switcher and bring the application back. Minimize had the advantage over closing the document in that it preserves the state of the document perfectly. It's not actually closing anything. It's just not visible at the moment. But the big disadvantage is that it works on all the windows of the app at once. I've got two windows here. If I wanted to just get rid of one window and work on the other, Hide won't do that for me. It get's rid of both.
Notice that a hiding nor minimizing work if you're using Full Screen windows. So I take this window full screen and I can't minimize it because then there would be nothing here. This is an entire space taken up with just this window. So minimizing doesn't make sense. Also, you can't Hide. The Hide option is not available because again there would be nothing here on this space if I minimized or hid that window. It wouldn't make sense to do it. I would just switch back to another Desktop space or another Full Screen space if I didn't want to see this.
Now another option you've got is to Quit. So Quit, like Hiding, will get rid of all the windows of the current app. So it won't work if you want to switch windows to get one out of the way. But it does work very similar to Closing in that well those documents are in fact closed. You can Quit here or just using Command Q notice it does it without any prompting because of auto-save. If I launch the app again it will bring those two windows back. It is a great option if you're working on multiple documents at the same time and you want to get rid of all those documents now maybe to focus on something completely different. Then you can just relaunch the app and bring them all back.
There's a setting for this under System Settings. Again, in Desktop & Dock under Windows & Apps. Close Windows When Quitting an Application. If you have this turned On then quitting actually closes all of the app's windows and the next time you launch the app those windows won't be brought back. So you want to have this turned OFF if you want to use Quitting as a convenient way to kind of just dismiss all the windows in an app and bring them back in one action.
Now the neat thing about quitting is that it works even if you've never saved the document. So, for instance, if I do a new document here in Pages. Create it. I'll just type something in it like that. If I were to Close it it's going to prompt me to Save it. I haven't saved it anywhere yet. So I've got to at least save it once before it auto-saves. If I go to Quit it it's going to instead just kind of save that to some system space and it will bring the document back even though it has not been saved yet. If I try to Close it now it still will prompt me where to save it because I still haven't saved it. But it is a way that if you are working on a document and haven't saved it yet and want to get it out of the way it's kind of neat that quitting will not actually destroy the work that you're doing but preserve it. Now note close windows when quitting an application. Now if you go to Quit it is actually going to prompt you to save because you've told it you want to close this window and start fresh the next time you launch Pages.
Now a lot of this works different if you're using Mission Control, like I showed before, and you've got something, say, as a Full Screen window then things are going to work different and you're going to have to switch between the windows even if you've got multiple desktops you can put one window on one desktop and one on the other and switch between those. So this window is completely out of the way when I go to the first desktop and this window is completely out of the way when I go to the second desktop. But if you use Mission Control you probably are using it for just this reason and you already know this.
Now you should note that if you're using Stage Manager then minimizing works differently. So here I've got the System Settings App here. If I click on that you can see both Pages windows go here. Now if I want to get one of these Pages windows out of the way and I go to minimize it with the yellow button or using Command M it will minimize into Stage Manager, to the left. If I click it again it comes back and if I minimize like this and then I switch to another app notice that when I go back here it just brings back that one window and I only get the second window if I click that to bring it forward. Now there is also a System Setting for that. Also under Desktop & Dock there is a setting for Stage Manager. Go to customize and you can have the Show Windows from Application set to one at a time. Now I'm going to turn off Stage Manager and turn it back on again so I changed that setting. Now notice I've got these two windows here. If I click on the left side it will switch between the two windows and it could be three or four windows they're showing only one at a time which is kind of useful.
One thing I know I'm going to be asked about is Memory Use and of course closing a document is going to save some memory as opposed to minimizing it or hiding the entire app. Quitting the app will save you even more memory because it closes all the documents and all the app as well. However, with modern Macs it's not as much of a concern. Most of the time you'll be working with documents, like in Pages, then it is not going to use that much memory if you're not actually using the window. So if it is hidden or minimized it's not going to be that much of a problem. But when it comes to web browsers it is a slightly different story. Having windows, especially with ones with lots of tab open, do use a lot of memory and may retain those as they do things in the background. So closing windows and tabs in Safari can actually save a bunch of memory especially if one of those tabs is a real memory hog. But otherwise your documents, unless it is a large thing like a huge photoshop document then I wouldn't really worry able closing it if you don't need to close it. Hide or Minimize, if you think you're going back to that document soon.
Now if you trying to figure out which one of these you should be using, keep in mind they overlap a lot. So there is no perfect solution. There are situations where any of them would be fine and situations where two or three of them are equally as good. So, sometimes it is just a matter of preference, whether you like to close files or whether you like to Hide apps as opposed to finding the right one as there may not be just one right one in any situation. But I hope, at least, this overview gives you an idea of what the difference is between all of them are. Thanks for watching.Related Subjects: Mac Basics (34 videos)
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