Outdated terminology

[simont]

It occurred to me the other day that there's an incredibly common piece of jargon in software which doesn't make any real sense in the modern world; and this jargon word is not safely hidden behind the scenes where it only bothers programmers, but instead it forms an important part of the user interface of a great many programs. And I've never seen it remarked upon before, which is why I only just noticed it myself after a decade and a half of using GUIs.

That word is ‘exit’.

In the old days of single-process operating systems like DOS, this word made complete sense. Your computer could only do one job at a time; so once you started (say) your word processor, you couldn't do anything other than word processing without first getting back out of that environment and returning to some other context, typically the command prompt from which you launched the word processor. Hence ‘exit’; the metaphor was that you, the user, were in some sense immersed in the word-processing environment, and you wanted to leave it and go somewhere else. And not just the user, either; it made sense from a programmer perspective as well, because the CPU was stuck executing the same program until it could get out of the word processor and go back to the operating system.

But none of this has been the case since the advent of the windowed GUI. Your word processor at no point defines the limits of your interaction with the computer; it's just one of many applications each of which is contained within its own window. You don't need to ‘exit’ it in order to do something else, because you're not trapped in it: you can quite happily do something else while the word processor is still running, and indeed you probably did. When you've finished word-processing, you want the word-processing program to terminate, or to shut down, or to disappear, or to close, or simply stop or end, but you probably no longer think in terms of getting out of it. And yet the vast majority (at least out of a hasty and unscientific small sample) of GUI applications still describe this function in their menu bar by the word ‘Exit’ – and even the most naïve users cheerfully take this for granted, because they accept that that's just the way user interface designers talk.

I suppose you could argue that you want the program to exit, to leave your screen and wander off to wherever software goes when it isn't running; but it doesn't seem to me that that's really been the intended metaphor at any point. Also it's unnecessarily inaccurate, and somewhat patronising: it smacks rather of telling small children that their deceased pet has ‘gone away’.

I don't imagine there's any getting away from it now; the word has become such standard terminology that users would probably be disoriented to find alternatives like ‘Vanish’ at the bottom of their File menu. But it struck me as interesting that this curious linguistic vestige of single-process operating systems is now so universal, even among people who never used such a system.

Comments

[ewx.livejournal.com]

It appears to be spelled 'Quit' on this instance of Firefox.

[simont]

Quit is marginally better than Exit, I think; it at least can be read in the sense of "stop" rather than "leave".

(Of course that touches on another UI design rant, which is the casual and endemic inconsistency in deciding what should be the subject of command verb: with Exit, I'm exiting the program, but with Quit the program is quitting, at least if you choose to read it in that sense.)

[ewx.livejournal.com]

I think people use 'Quit' with the human regarded as the active party, too, when talking about terminating programs, in practice. "Quit all programs before installing this update", "try quitting and restarting", etc.

[fanf]

OTOH, the "force quit" feature of Mac OS is definitely forcing an app to quit.

[sparrowsion]

Everything I currently have open spells it "Quit". And some of them (Konqueror) don't even manage to have a File menu to put it on. (Ditto on Macs, where it's been Command-Q-for-Quit since forever.) The only place(s) where it's still called "exit" to the best of my knowledge is in command line interfaces (and even there, gdb for one knows "quit" but not "exit") and possibly some bits of GUI API.

[simont]

Hmm. Well, my small and unscientific sample included Evolution and VMware on Linux, and MS Word on Windows, and they all say "Exit". GNOME and KDE do seem to have pretty much standardised on "Quit" in all their minor applications like games, now I look at it; but my copy of AbiWord on this machine says "Exit" too. So my sample might have been a bit one-sided, but it looks to me as if yours was too.

"exit" still makes some sense in command-line interfaces, of course, since there often is a suspended shell to which the easiest way to return is to terminate the foreground CLI application.

[mair_in_grenderich]

*checks*

opera says exit, sylpheed says exit. I don't appear to have anything else clicky open, except xdvi which doesn't have a special button for closing it.

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

My copy of Evolution says 'Quit'. As do Firefox, X-Chat and Gaim. Gnumeric and Abiword both offer 'close' and 'quit', with apparently the same result unless I'm missing something.

*starts exploring menus*

OpenOffice Writer has 'exit'. That's about the only one I can find on this machine (Debian Linux, predominantly running GNOME applications).

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

Tumbolia is a subdistrict of the Magical Place Called Away, where things go when people put them in the bin, place them in the sink and turn on the tap or throw them out of moving car windows, or for certain very special people, even when they just don't happen to be looking at them anymore.

[beckyc.livejournal.com]

you want the program to exit, to leave your screen and wander off to wherever software goes when it isn't running

Pursued by a bear?

[simont]

I don't doubt that some window manager somewhere has a mode in which a closing window scuttles off one side of your screen while a roaring bear charges in from the other side in hot pursuit. Or, failing that, that one will have shortly after a WM developer or two find their way to this post :-)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Friendslocking serves so many purposes :)

[gerald_duck]

The same thing happened to "print" many years earlier.

[deborah_c]

wherever software goes when it isn't running

Given the quality of most modern commercial software, I have the image of it all slinking off to some seedy disreputable bar somewhere...

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

Aha! Have you got my text message? I am having small serotonin crisis and need to figure out things, because it is my turn to be official cook today.

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

Well, in Windows at least, the Windows terminology is 'Close'. If you click the top left icon for any window it will present the standard window menu including Close. Therefore I don't think many people will be so confused if programmers switch to 'Close' instead of 'Exit' - it may confuse for the first couple of times, but at any rate I always close programs with the big red X and never off a menu anyway. In fact I dislike menus and use toolbars wherever possible; pictures and positions are far more memorable than text (especially text that changes position - I always make the full menus appear.. I should probably turn off the menu contraction thing).

[uisgebeatha.livejournal.com]

Different programs and windows have 'Exit', 'Quit' and 'Close' on my computer. I would be happy to have a giant black and yellow 'Nuke' command instead. ;)

[simont]

And when the program locks up and won't respond to "Nuke", the OS provides an unblockable "Nuke From Orbit"?

Did you get my email this morning, incidentally? I wasn't sure what the best address to use was.

[uisgebeatha.livejournal.com]

Indeed; Windoze Vista might need one of those options, perhaps when the apparent reams of memory obtained by the crazy new 'use USB sticks as extensions of RAM' plan makes Word weep and do silly things. ;)

I did indeed get your email, though Hotmail helpfully labelled you as junk so I had to rescue you. The Bug Fairy now sits proudly on my desktop, thankee kindly for that! :) I may draw something based on her tonight...

"Bug fairy"

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Oh! You're now the second person I've in two days been recommended Casey and Andy by; I started reading and it is funny :)

[flats.livejournal.com]

'Nuke' is manifestly Ctrl-Alt-Delete, otherwise known as the Fuck Off And Die You Piece of Shit key combination.

[sunflowerinrain.livejournal.com]

In the case of Word, could I have an option labelled "Piss off and Die, You Bloated Excuse for a Wordprocessor"?

Or perhaps "Piss off and Die when *I* say, not just when you feel like it"?

I thank you.

[sunflowerinrain.livejournal.com]

ps We are still hoping for PuTTY tshirts.. ;)

[simont]

If you're serious about that, then I'm afraid I have to confess that I have no idea how you'd go about getting a T-shirt printed with a colour image on it. Last time I looked into this with my local T-shirt shop, the options were screen printing (limited to one colour), or the nasty laser-printing method which (a) can only make light shirts darker and not vice versa, and (b) seems to give grotty-looking and inadequately durable results.

[pjc50.livejournal.com]

Talking T's can do multiple-colour screenprinted shirts for an incremental cost per layer, up to about three or four IIRC. Full-colour I think has to be the laser process.

[simont]

Hm. Well, the PuTTY icon (which was what sunflowerinrain and I agreed ought to go on a hypothetical PuTTY T-shirt) technically ought to include three different shades of grey/white, two shades of blue, and yellow (plus a black border if the shirt itself isn't black). I suppose one could cut that down to just white, blue and yellow by halftoning, but halftoning would probably cause its own difficulties when it comes to screen-printing.

It's annoying. bjh21 has a dark-coloured T-shirt with what looks like a genuinely full-colour image on the front (gradually varying shades, the whole works), so it's clearly possible to make the things, but I have no idea how.

[womble2.livejournal.com]

They can also do transfers, as used for the Debian "Grolsch" T-shirt. Those are somewhat less durable though.

[timotab.livejournal.com]

Consider Cafe Press. No worries then about print-run expenses.

[fluffyrichard.livejournal.com]

I can't find any applications left on my (ubuntu feisty bleeding edge) system which use the term "Exit" - though I haven't looked hard. Evolution now has two options at the bottom of the "File" menu: "Close window" and "Quit". This distinction makes sense for applications like evolution which can have many windows open at once, of course - Quit gets rid of the application completely, for use when you've finished with it, and Close just closes the thing you were looking at it. Closing the final window is equivalent to Quit, in the case of evolution.

I have some other applications which have both "Close" and "Quit" options. One example is the Rhythmbox music player - which only has one main window, but if you close that window you might want the music to keep playing. Quit stops the music, Close doesn't. (There's a little notification icon left if you want to control the music playback.)

Unfortunately, if you click on the standard "X" icon in the window title, Rhythmbox performs the quit operation instead of the close operation. Which is just annoying. Hmm. *goes to report a bug*

[senji.livejournal.com]

Firefox has 'Quit', fvwm has 'Exit' but that seems to make sense, Outlook has 'Exit' as does ICAClient....

Oh, and pterm doesn't seem to have a way of terminating itself from the menu. :)

[kaet.livejournal.com]

BTW, apropos of not much: if you type "homepage" into google (don't ask!), PuTTY is the third hit, beneath the BBC and Google.