Mac Basics: The Red, Yellow and Green Window Buttons

The Red, Yellow and Green buttons at the top left corner of windows on a Mac perform a variety of functions. They are similar to, but different than buttons at the top of windows in other operating systems. Find out how they work and learn some tips.

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Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's take a look at the red, yellow, and green buttons at the top left corner of each window on your Mac. 
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So if you're new to the Mac or even if you've been using it for awhile you may not know everything about the red, yellow, and green buttons that you'll find at the top left corner of just about every window in every app that you use on your Mac. Let's start with the red button. The red button simply closes the current window. In many applications a window is the equivalent to a document. So in Pages here I have a document that's in a window. So clicking the red button will close that document. Now let's say I have multiple documents open. So I've got two Pages documents here and I want to close them all at once. I could click this red button here and then this red button to close both of them. But I could also hold the Option key down and click one of the red buttons and all of the document windows close. Now it's important to note that on a Mac when you close a document it doesn't necessarily quit the app. This is different than it is on Windows. Here I've got one window, one document open in Pages. If I click the Close button notice Pages is still running. The idea here is you should be able to close that window and then go to File, New or Open to create a new document or open a new one. You don't have to relaunch the app again. If you want to Close and Quit the app at the same time simply use the App Menu and Quit or the keyboard shortcut Command Q. That will close all of the windows and quit the app. 
Now there's a keyboard shortcut for this red button. It's always Command W. So in Pages here if I go to File, and I look at Close you can see it's Command W. That will close the current window which is also a document. But it works in other apps too. For instance here I am in the Finder and if I go to File and look for Command W you can see it's Close Window. The Finder doesn't have a document open. It has a window open. But the effect is the same. The window goes away. The same thing in Safari. This isn't a document but it's a webpage. But File and Close Window is Command W. So in almost all cases Command W is the same as using the red button. You should also note that if you have a window open with multiple Tabs with either documents or other content in those tabs then the red button closes the entire window including all of those tabs. If you want to close just a tab you would click the Close button in that Tab and note that under File, Command W is Close Tab. So if you have multiple tabs in a window Command W becomes Close Tab instead of Close Window. Shift Command W then usually becomes Close Window although that might vary by app.
So now let's look at the yellow button. The yellow button is called the Minimize Button. What it will do is it will take the current window and it will move it to the Dock. So I'll click this Pages document's yellow button here and you could see it shrinks down into the Dock. If I then look at the Dock, on the right side, I'll see that window shrunk down to an icon. I could click it and bring the window back. This is handy when you have multiple windows open in an app. Whether it's multiple webpages in Safari or multiple documents in Pages. You can get one out of the way by minimizing it into the Dock. However, in most cases what you should really do is simply use the red button. Close the window. You can easily reopen it later on. Or if the app only has one window open, or you want to get all the windows for that app out of the way, use the App Menu and then Hide, or Command H. This Hides the entire app instantly and then you could bring the app back really easily with that window or multiple windows back into the same positions they were before. In most cases Command H for hide is preferable over minimize or simply closing the window is preferable. 
Now you have some options in System Preferences when it comes to Minimize. If you go to Dock & Menu Bar, make sure you've selected Dock & Menu Bar here on the left, and then you could set the effect to be used when minimizing. So I could change from a genie effect to a scale effect. Now when I minimize this Pages window it does that instead of kind of the genie in a bottle effect. You also could choose to minimize windows into the application icon. So when I select that look what happens. I can minimize this and you could see it goes into the Pages icon rather than to the right side of the Dock. This is handy if you plan on using this a lot. The right side of the Dock could fill up with lots of icons. But now I've just got it here in the Pages icon. If I click and hold on this for a second you could see that minimized window right here. I can select it to bring it back. Now there is a keyboard shortcut for minimize. Go to Window you'll see Minimize at the top usually and it's Command M. So you can use Command M instead of clicking on the yellow button. Note that if you have multiple windows open, just like you could Option and the red button to close all the windows, you could use Option and the yellow button to minimize all of the windows.
Now let's look at the most complex of all the buttons, the green button. This is sometimes called the Zoom button, which refers to old default functionality. It isn't what it does now. It would be more accurate now to refer to it as the Full Screen Button  because that's what it does by default. It's also sometimes called the Maximize button because it seems to resemble the maximize button in Windows. But that's completely inaccurate. It never really does the maximize function like Windows does. So in macOS Big Sur if you move your cursor to the green button usually you automatically get this pop-up list here. Otherwise you can click and then hold for a second and this list appears. So you can see there's a lot of things that the green button can do. But by default if I just ignore this and click the green button what it will do is enter full screen mode with that window. So full screen mode gets rid of the Menu Bar at the top, the Dock at the bottom, and even the Tool Bar at the top of a lot of apps. But you could always move the cursor to the top to get the Menu Bar back including the red, yellow, and green buttons, or the bottom to get the Dock. To exit full screen you can use that green button as well. So that's kind of what it does by default. There's a keyboard shortcut for that that's usually in the View Menu in most apps and it's Control Command F. 
But the green button does other things as well. For instance, looking at this menu, I can use Split View instead of Full Screen View by tiling to the left or right of the screen. If I tile to the left I'm asked to pick another window to view to the right. If I tile to the right I'm asked to pick another window to view to the left. So this is how you get into Split View. Now you also get options here at the bottom to move the window to another display if you have more than one display attached to your Mac. Or if you have an iPad nearby and you have Sidecar enabled you'll get the option here to move that window to your iPad and use your iPad as another display. So all that can be accessed through the green button. But the green button does even more than that! Because if you hold the Option key down and move your cursor over it you could see instead of having the little arrows pointing to top left and bottom right for full screen it changes to Plus. Now you could see the main option here is Zoom. If you click on the green button with the Option key down it does Zoom which is all the green button used to do many years ago before the Mac had full screen mode. 
So what does Zoom do? Well, people usually think that Zoom is the same as maximize on Windows and it will take the window to the largest size for the screen. But that's not what happens at all. For instance look what happens when I use the Zoom option for this Finder window. You could see it actually shrinks the screen. What Zoom does is it enlarges the window to the maximum size needed to contain all the content according to that app's definition of all of the content. So here in the Finder there are just these ten icons. That's all it needs. So it resizes the window to fit those ten icons. In Pages here, if I use the green button with the Option key down for Zoom, what it will do is it will resize the window so it's the perfect width to fit this page in here. It can't be the perfect height to fit the page in here because the page is too big. But at least it can do the width. So you could see the window now goes from top to bottom but left to right only as much as needed to fit the entire document in there. 
So now the question is usually get is, But I want to take the window to fill the entire screen. There's got to be a way to do that. Right? Well, there is and I've shown this in other tutorials. You can double click on any corner of a window and it will snap to the corner of the screen. If you use the Option key it will do the same thing but for the opposite corner as well. In other words it will snap all four sides to the edges of the screen. So hold the Option key down. Double click anyone of the four corners. Now you've maximized that window.
Now the green button with the Option key held down also gives you the opportunity to move the window to the left side or right side of the screen. So when I select that what it does is it resizes the window to perfectly fit the left half of the screen. Or I could use Move to the Right Side of the Screen and it does that. Note that there's also a Revert option once you've used one of those two move commands. Now keyboard shortcuts for the green button, of course, vary because there's so many different functions it performs. I've already showed you that in the View Menu in most apps Enter Full Screen is Control Command F. In the Window Menu you'll find Zoom and Tile to the left or right, in other words start split view, but usually no keyboard shortcuts are assigned to those although you can set your own custom ones in System Preferences. If I hold the Option key down, Tiling changes to Move. So I can move the window to the left or right side with the Option key. But still no keyboard shortcuts. 
So I want to finish with a quick tip. You can, of course, use these buttons here or keyboard shortcuts or Menu Commands to access all these functions. But you can also use the Title Bar area. In other words any area here at the top of a window that doesn't have a button or some other element in it. If you go to System Preferences and then back to Dock & Menu Bar. Select Dock & Menu Bar here. There's the option for double click a window's Title Bar To. You have to have that checked. Then you can select Zoom or Minimize. So you can use one of these two functions when you double click in the Title Bar. So I have it set to Zoom. So you can see when I double click here it does the same thing as the Zoom function. In this case resizing the Finder window to perfectly fit these items. I can also double click here to do it. You can see it toggles back and forth going to the previous size of the window or the Zoom size. 
So that's a look at the red, yellow, and green buttons on windows on your Mac.

Comments: 4 Responses to “Mac Basics: The Red, Yellow and Green Window Buttons”

Karl

3 weeks ago

I like the “minimize windows into application icon” function. But what happens if you don’t have the application icon in the pop up menu bar, where does the window go to?

Gary Rosenzweig

Karl: Do you mean the Dock? If an app is running, it is in the Dock. It may be on the right side, but it will be there, Try it and see.

Jennifer McGarry

When I go to system preferences it only shows the dock not the menu bar. My computer is a 2013 so I can only update to 10.15.7. am I doing something wrong? Also when I get full screen I have trouble exiting the full screen.

Jennifer: Yes, it will look very different if you aren’t using Big Sur yet. To exit full screen, you can use the menu bar (View, Exit Full Screen) or click the green button again.

Mac Basics: The Red, Yellow and Green Window Buttons

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