[HN Gopher] X to Close - The origins of the use of [x] in UI des...
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X to Close - The origins of the use of [x] in UI design. (2014)
Author : bj-rn
Score : 119 points
Date : 2023-07-30 14:16 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (medium.com)
| junglistguy wrote:
| [dead]
| sixthDot wrote:
| The big question is: why do people still put a "Quit" MenuItem in
| their File menu ?
| mcpackieh wrote:
| At this point, putting it anywhere else would make people even
| more confused.
| RodgerTheGreat wrote:
| For many applications, especially on MacOS, closing a window
| and exiting the application are not the same operation.
| pasc1878 wrote:
| In MacOS quit is not in the File menu. It is in the menu
| which is the name of the application, along with About,
| Preferences/Settings, Hide, Services.
|
| The File menu has Close.
| fredoralive wrote:
| Pedantically, Quit was in the File menu in classic Mac OS.
| The application menu is was added in Mac OS X.
| pasc1878 wrote:
| Ah I came to macOS from NeXT so I have always seen it
| that way.
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| >Batsu (x) is the symbol for incorrect, and can represent false,
| bad, wrong or attack, while maru (o) means correct, true, good,
| whole, or something precious. Another familiar example of
| batsu/maru is in the Playstation controller design, where maru
| and batsu are used for yes and no.
|
| Interestingly, X is no/O is yes only on Playstation games
| released in Japan. For games released everywhere else in the
| world, it's reversed (which I always found odd, since I think of
| X as a pretty universal symbol for "no"). Previous HN discussion
| speculating on reasons for the switch here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8171430
| Andrex wrote:
| They changed this with PS5 to use the western configuration,
| even in Japan.
|
| The reactions from Japanese gamers were quite humorous.
|
| "At last they're making it uniform? Japan has been defeated."
|
| "Yep, trash."
|
| "Sony traitors."
|
| "This is a bullshit console."
|
| "This means that the circle on the Japanese flag is now
| 'cancel.'"
|
| https://kotaku.com/sony-is-changing-the-confirm-and-cancel-b...
| c-hendricks wrote:
| Related, but I would love to read about the switch in the
| Western world when we went from Triangle to go back, to Circle.
|
| It's probably just due to consistency with the Xbox.
| LinAGKar wrote:
| And maybe also consistency with the system UI, since the
| system UI on the PS2 (and maybe PS1, not sure) used circle
| for back, while PS1 and PS2 games used triangle. On the PS3
| you would use the system UI a lot more, so maybe games
| switched to match.
| pavlov wrote:
| The empty circle is a common Western symbol for "off", as in
| power switches.
|
| It associates with zero == false == no. I suspect this is why
| Sony swapped the meanings.
|
| The meaning of an X symbol isn't universal even in Europe, but
| it's often used to mark a point of interest or active selection
| (as in ticking boxes, or "X marks the spot").
| chrisacky wrote:
| I wonder if this is why Nintendo reversed the meaning of B A
| on their controllers.
|
| I hate that the switch does this.
|
| But it means sense if everyone in Japan is used to that
| behaviour because of the swapping of X and O on Playstation.
| kyle-rb wrote:
| The Switch didn't change the meaning of A and B; the OS and
| all first-party Nintendo games that I've seen use A=confirm
| and B=cancel, which has been the case for a long time.
|
| There are some games I've played on the Switch that use
| B=confirm, I think usually so that button layout is the
| same across consoles.
| debugnik wrote:
| What do you mean reversed? The NES already assigned letters
| right-to-left: B A!
|
| Controllers typically used sets of A-B(-C) X-Y(-Z) face
| buttons, A/B intuitively meaning ok/back however they were
| laid out, usually in straight or angled rows assigned left-
| to-right (e.g. Sega) or right-to-left (e.g. Nintendo). The
| angled layouts are the modern Xbox and Nintendo layouts
| (which Nintendo used since forever and Xbox I guess
| inherited from their Windows CE involvement with Sega).
|
| But Sony came up with the symbols instead, so Japanese devs
| followed the maru/batsu metaphor with circle/X, whereas
| early western games used X/triangle until they switched to
| X/circle, and those became official regional layouts until
| the PS5 switched Japan to X/circle.
| thfuran wrote:
| >The empty circle is a common Western symbol for "off", as in
| power switches.
|
| Was that the case when the PlayStation initially released?
| fsckboy wrote:
| based only on my memory, when computers started to get
| small enough to have power switches that I had access to,
| the power toggle switches were marked with 0 and 1, and no
| other appliances had that, so it was basically engineers of
| digital devices marking things with some combination of
| obvious logic and humor.
|
| the on-off-merged-in-one-pushbutton 0 with a 1 at 12 oclock
| (in the circle of the 0) came later, I assume out of Europe
| (Asia?), because suddenly all at once everything had them,
| mid 90s I think. That was also the beginning of
| globalization (meaning, identical products sold everywhere)
| and also "on/off are advisories, not switches", which was
| probably all just coincidental timing.
|
| (I don't think the 0/1 toggle computer power switch
| labelling somehow had more influence over Europeans or
| Asians than it did over Americans, but I dunno, engineers
| are pretty universal)
| zambal wrote:
| Yes, using I/O as on/off, especially on power switches, for
| sure predates PlayStations.
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _X symbol isn't universal even in Europe, but it's often
| used to mark a point of interest or active selection_
|
| X is commonly used for crossing things out, and marking
| things wrong
| mk_stjames wrote:
| For me, I noticed the 'X' on the Playstation controllers is
| located right where my right hand thumb naturally wants to come
| to rest when holding the controller. And, when starting a game
| and selecting 'Yes' many times in a row to get going (as
| usually happens at some point when going thru options and menus
| and setup, etc), it feels natural to just go straight for that
| button, the X, rather than the O, to me; the O button being
| just a slight up-and-to-the-right movement from where my thumb
| is naturally sitting.
|
| Now, I never played a lot of Playstation. But maybe my short
| amount of time playing had already contrived muscle memory for
| my thumb to hover over 'X' instead of 'O', and I'm swapping the
| cause of the natural feel.
|
| It would be interesting then, if Japanese games all use the 'O'
| as the yes/confirm/next style button in games, do Japanese
| gamers have a 'naturally' different thumb resting-hover
| position when picking up a Playstation controller?
|
| If not, I'm surprised Sony did not have the X and O reversed on
| the earliest design of the controller.
| badtension wrote:
| > the O button being just a slight up-and-to-the-right
| movement from where my thumb is naturally sitting.
|
| It reminds me of the Yes/No vs. No/Yes debate in the OS UI
| world. In windows we get _Yes_ on the left and _No_ on the
| right, which exactly the same as with the PS controller.
|
| In Linux this is often reversed and only when you make the
| change you notice how much you get used to it being one way
| or the other.
|
| I wonder what the order is in Japanese Windows and if it
| affects Japanese PS controller users at all.
| plorg wrote:
| I've never given much thought to this, but I use Windows at
| work and Linux at home and haven't clocked the difference.
| At work I mapped the up-and-right thumb button on my mouse
| to "Enter" and the down-and-left button to "Esc", which I
| find very convenient specifically for CAD. I got my mouse
| replaced when the left click button went bad and took the
| old mouse home and replaced the switch. I set up the same
| mapping, and I haven't noticed any dissonance.
|
| The biggest confusion I notice is scroll-to-zoom, where you
| have a 50% chance of using up to zoom in down to zoom out
| and 50% of the other way. I haven't found a good way to
| guess which applications will do which (on my CAD
| workstation I have one of two programs set to inverted
| scroll, and I won't remember which one it is unless I run
| into a new installation).
| Narishma wrote:
| On Linux the order is different between Gnome and KDE. At
| least it used to be, I haven't used Gnome since 2.x
| parpfish wrote:
| I've noticed that nintendo games tend to use rightmost button
| as yes/accept and bottom button as no/cancel, just like the
| Japanese Playstation layout.
|
| If I switch between Nintendo and US-Playstation there's
| usually a short adjustment period where I need to learn to
| put my right thumb back into the correct "home" position.
| Both feel comfortable and adjusting to the new normal is
| pretty fast.
| havblue wrote:
| It's doubly annoying to switch back and forth between using
| an Xbox controller, where a-b and x-y are reversed as well.
| Good luck on those quick time events. Compliments to the
| switch where they simply used a diamond pattern with the
| necessary button highlighted.
| debugnik wrote:
| > Interestingly, X is no/O is yes only on Playstation games
| released in Japan.
|
| Not anymore as of PS5 though, not sure why they chose to change
| it.
| delecti wrote:
| Makes sense. The PS4 came out in 2013/4, and in 2016 Sony
| restructured their games division, and it's now managed in
| the US.
| debugnik wrote:
| I don't think the team being US-based is enough to explain
| why did they choose to unify the layout, only why did they
| unify on the western one.
| vmladenov wrote:
| I find it amusing that Sony's "accept" button matches
| Nintendo's (A) placement but only in Japan.
| ecshafer wrote:
| Some old PlayStation 1 games kept the O yes and X no
| configuration even in the US. final fantasy 7 sticks out
| especially as a game that kept this control scheme.
| capableweb wrote:
| I want to remember that Metal Gear Solid also kept the
| Japanese configuration (in the European version), but I'm not
| sure how reliable my memories are of the late 90s
| zerocrates wrote:
| Metal Gear Solid was like this in America also: X is cancel
| and O is confirm in the menus.
| zerocrates wrote:
| The "original/intended" layout was used a little bit on some
| Western releases in the early days: Final Fantasy 7 memorably
| has X as cancel and O as confirm, for example.
|
| As others have pointed out, the "flipped" version eventually
| dominated to the extent that they changed it even in Japan,
| though maybe you can blame Sony's increasingly Western focus
| there.
|
| Switching it for the West never really made any sense and has
| only ever led to more confusion than if they hadn't done it at
| all.
| shaunxcode wrote:
| Well the song "straight edge" by Minor Threat and the subsequent
| movement happened in 1981 and they used the X to indicate they
| abstained from drink/drugs (closing them down as it were).
| Perhaps that is where it came from??
| bradrn wrote:
| > No [x] to close these 1980's text editors either. X was
| commonly used to delete characters in-line, but not to close the
| program.
|
| Not _quite_ true. In Vim, :x means 'save and close buffer', and
| is a synonym for :wq. (Not sure if this was present in earlier Vi
| or not, but I believe it was.)
| icedchai wrote:
| When you're in vi (or vim) normal mode, x does delete
| characters.
| ksherlock wrote:
| But classic Mac OS _did_ have an X close button. Sure, it 's a
| square in the screen shots but what happens when you click on it?
| CharlesW wrote:
| I'm not sure if there's a name for it, but it's not an X. You
| can try it yourself here:
| https://infinitemac.org/1988/System%206.0
|
| The "x" during hover was apparently added in MacOS X.
| RodgerTheGreat wrote:
| This: https://i.imgur.com/rjfxoRy.gif
| wolfgang42 wrote:
| The pressed state for the close box was a sort of starburst
| thing, not an X. (Possibly you're thinking of checkboxes, which
| were squares that got crossed out when they were checked.)
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Bunch of previous discussion from 2014:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8171340
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Including a screenshot of NeXTSTEP in 1988 with an [x]
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8171375
| irdc wrote:
| Interestingly, ArthurOS (what would eventually be renamed to RISC
| OS) version 1.2 from 1987 already used an [x] to close
| (https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/riscos12) thus
| predating NeXTSTEP.
| gjvc wrote:
| Apropos this sort of thing: Around that time, one of the
| employees of Acornsoft took the RISC OS "icon bar" concept with
| him to Microsoft, where it became the "task bar" in Windows 95.
| Source: ex-Acornsoft employee whom I talk to at meetups from
| time to time. I have mentioned to him that the icon bar
| launched many careers, not just programs :-)
| hunters_laptop wrote:
| I heard that actually american copycat from japanese culture
| failuser wrote:
| So were did NeXT get it?
|
| Before that I assume "x" was a metaphor for crossing out the page
| of text or paragraph marking it invalid. That is probably not as
| universal.
|
| Windows 3 was using "x" in checkboxes as well, I wonder if
| switching to checkmarks is connected to putting "x" on the "close
| window" button.
| mmcconnell1618 wrote:
| It's interesting that in the context of a pirate map, X, marks
| the spot of the treasure to be found while in another context, X,
| means close the window or "incorrect." I wonder which one will be
| most accurate for Twitter's new branding?
| [deleted]
| ognyankulev wrote:
| I can confidently say that Elon's X won't become Japan's
| WeChat.
| vsnf wrote:
| An easy bet to make, given that WeChat is Chinese.
| DANmode wrote:
| The commenter meant a Japanese version of WeChat.
| n3storm wrote:
| Reading artile with this Fwm4 theme https://www.xfce-
| look.org/p/1211669/ and saying "really? atari? maru?"
| evaneykelen wrote:
| Surprising that the article doesn't mention the word eXit.
| tezza wrote:
| Good suggestion
|
| My personal conjecture is that the Close action had the purpose
| to kill off your graphical work at that point.
|
| So death for that portion...
|
| Death often being depicted in cartoons (inc. black and white)
| with an X over both eyelids
| hawski wrote:
| Seeing "kill off" and "cartoons" reminds me of a skull and
| crossbones as the symbol of pirates - pillage and kill.
| Crossbones make an X symbol.
| tyingq wrote:
| One of my favorite fumbles from Google's AMP project. For a
| while, if you navigated to an AMP site from the carousel...The
| [X] on the AMP-injected header would send them back to Google,
| rather than dismiss the header.
| 3cats-in-a-coat wrote:
| From now on, clicking [x] anywhere in an UI will open Twitter.
| Garlef wrote:
| This is another reason why the "X" rebrand of twitter is not only
| a good idea: I've already pressed the "X" logo to close the
| window.
| [deleted]
| amelius wrote:
| There is a huge difference between X and x. The former has angles
| != 90 degrees, unlike the latter.
| Sharlin wrote:
| The left-hand title bar button in Windows 3.x was not a close
| button, mind, it opened the title bar dropdown menu (which was
| changed to a right-click context menu in Windows 95).
| FreeFull wrote:
| It did however close the window if you double-clicked it, which
| carried over into newer versions of Windows too.
| floxy wrote:
| Came across this interesting take:
|
| > When I see an "X" in the corner of an image I see on screen, it
| feels as though clicking on it will make it go away. Now,
| clicking on an "X" is supposed to feel like a way to take me onto
| The Website Formerly Known as Twitter. But my instinct is to
| click when something is annoying me, not to click when I want
| more.
|
| https://althouse.blogspot.com/2023/07/a-problem-with-x.html
| webwielder2 wrote:
| NeXTSTEP ended up being the visual foundation and the actual
| foundation of the two major operating systems that it had sought
| to supplant in the first place.
| bArray wrote:
| > And Linux GUI's started to use the [x] symbol only after the
| release of Windows 95.
|
| Which? The website linked to is hardly comprehensive [1]. There's
| literally tonnes of X window managers pre-1993 [2].
|
| [1]
| https://web.archive.org/web/20160516213015/http://whiteandno...
|
| [2] https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Guide_to_X11/Window_Managers
| bmacho wrote:
| Another example from 1987, England RISC OS
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3N2FF9h-aL0
|
| It sounds wild that the X == denial originates from Japan.
| brookst wrote:
| First impression reading the headline was that Musk is even more
| impetuous than I'd thought.
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