GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 137227
Shortcut for closing window and document. Remove quit
Last modified: 2020-12-04 18:20:21 UTC
There are some confusion between different gnome applications on how to deal with "quit". Epiphany only has "close" which is done with ctrl+w. The same goes for gthumb. Other programs, like gucharmap, only has Quit, ctrl+q. And gconf-editor includes both close and quit. In all of this cases, both quit and close does the same thing. Close the window. Some applications use ctrl+q to quit all open windows of that application. According to the gnome hig, most applications should be "Single Document Interface". A window represents the document the user is working on, just like each window in spatial nautilus represents a directory. This allows the user to work with documents instead of applications. Because of this, there is no use in having a "quit" command. The main thing for the user is not the application being use but the document. In SDI applications, there is no reason to have a "quit" key. Just close should do the trick. There are a couple of "Multiple Document Interface" in gnome, epiphany and gedit for example. At the moment, epiphany only has "close", while gedit has both quit and close. Because users are working with documents and not with applications, I suggest to include a "close window" besides "close" (or maybe "close document") that close the window. So, instead of todays close (ctrl+w) and quit (ctrl+q) I suggest that all SDIs only include close or close document (ctrl+w). MDIs should have a shortcut for close window, for example ctrl+q or ctrl+shift+w. Quit should be removed from the userinterface. A discussion about "quit" can be found at http://mpt.phrasewise.com/stories/storyReader$374
(Dang, that's the second time I've stumbled over a link to my old Weblog in the past 14 minutes.) Even if you don't want to get rid of Quit just yet, a useful step would be recommending "Close" be used whenever the item closes just one window (or just one document, for apps that have multiple documents per window). So games, for example, should use "Close" rather than "Quit". Be consistent: the equivalent button in the title bar is called the close button, not the quit button.
*** Bug 165191 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
from bug 165191: Table 4.5 and Figure 4.10 seem to be aimed toward non-document based applications, as the use of the Quit menu item in the File menu is advertized. In particular, for Close (Ctrl+W), it says: 'Single document interface: close the application'. In a document-based application like evince, epiphany or eog, this seems to be the wrong recommendation, as only the current window/document view should be closed, not the application. A Quit item should even be discouraged in document-based applications because it requires the user to think about which application is used to view the current and possibly other documents. In non-document based applications, perhaps Quit should not be next to Close, because of the risk of accidentally clicking Quit when you meant Close.
Agree that we should elaborate the advice on quit and close. This can be added to the list of shortcuts in the keyboard input page.
I think we have this covered now. The shortcuts page specifies how Ctrl+W and Ctrl+Q should work with regards to closing windows: https://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-devel-docs/commit/?id=77bf275a2d21566546e70f0fc47460df5fc886c7 Also, the application menus page recommends always including a quit menu item.