If you're new to Mac you may be wondering about the exact functionality of the three
colored buttons that appear at the top left corner of just about every window you'll ever
see on the Mac.
These are the red, yellow, and green buttons, sometimes referred to as the traffic light
buttons.
Sometimes the middle button is referred to as orange rather than yellow although official
Apple documentation always calls it yellow.
So, what do these do?
Well, the first one is pretty obvious.
It closes the window.
Now modern applications automatically save the document when you close the window.
So you can close a window at any time and it will just close.
If you're working on an older document and you've made some changes since the last time
you saved you may be prompted to save the document before it closes.
Some apps, where there's just one big window and it's all the app has, if you close it
the entire app actually quits.
Now let's skip over to the green button.
The green button does two different things.
One thing it does is to take the app full screen.
As a matter of fact take that particular window full screen.
So I will click on it and you will see now it's full screen.
Everything else is gone except this one window in this app.
If I want to get the menu bar back, or even those colored buttons, just move the cursor
to the top of the screen.
You can see the menu bar comes back, the tool bar comes back, and there are those buttons
with a green button there that changes a little bit to indicate that I can click to go back
to the way it was before.
Now when you go full screen you can actually use Control up arrow to see what you've got
in terms of things full screen.
I've got the desktop, which is what I was working before, and a screen called Pages
and I can jump to either one.
So I can go back to the desktop there.
I can also use Control right arrow and left arrow to go back and forth between them.
So, of course, to get out of this and exit full screen, I press the green button again.
You can also use the green button with the Option key held down.
What that does is it will change to a plus + symbol and I click on it and enlarges the
window.
Now it doesn't enlarge it to fill the screen.
It enlarges it to fill the screen as much as it needs so everything fits in place.
So here in this Pages document if I expand the window a bit you can see I've got these
margins here on the left and right side of the page.
There's nothing in those margins.
So it won't expand the window to the point where I need that space.
You'll see I'll do it again.
Option and click the green button and it collapses it instead of expands it.
So now if I were to go and zoom in where the document is 300%, now if I click plus you
can see it expands it to fill all the space because the document itself, the margins,
are off to the left or right.
I can zoom out and you can see now, now I've got that extra space there.
So basically it's a logical kind of function.
It will expand the window as much as it needs but not more than it needs.
Now Option and clicking a second time will return the window to the size you had it before.
So if you had it this size, Option, click green enlarges it.
Option click green returns it to the size you had.
So you can toggle back and forth.
Now what about the yellow button.
Well, the yellow button minimizes the window or puts it in the Dock is what it really does.
So you can see a list of windows here in the Dock and I can click to bring it back.
Get rid of it.
It's just a handy way to get a window out of the way and then be able to bring it back
pretty easily.
Now what happens if you have more than one window.
Let's have two windows open here in Pages.
I can use the Option key and it will affect all windows.
So you can see both windows went there into the Dock when I held down the Option key and
clicked the yellow button.
If I didn't hold down the Option key only one goes in.
It's the same thing for, say, close.
If I were to hold down the Option key both windows close instead of just the one window.