X to Close – The origins of the use of [x] in UI design. (2014)

[MontyCarloHall]

>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, ╳ is no/◯ 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

[mk_stjames]

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.

[Andrex]

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...

[pavlov]

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”).

[debugnik]

> Interestingly, ╳ is no/◯ is yes only on Playstation games released in Japan.

Not anymore as of PS5 though, not sure why they chose to change it.

[zerocrates]

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.

[ralferoo]

I actually found this pretty confusing myself as the first PlayStation console I had was a PS3 that I bought in Hong Kong that had the Japanese button layout. Some time later, I was using this primarily with Linux under OtherOS and I bought a UK PS3 to play games with. It took me a long time to get used to the swapped buttons.

Interestingly, I later became a games developer and discovered that on the developer units you can change the O/X to confirm/cancel mapping in order to be able to test for correct behaviour in both locales, but as a frustrated player who was still getting them mixed up, I never understood why that option wasn't just available on the retail consoles as well.

> which I always found odd, since I think of X as a pretty universal symbol for "no"

As for this, I think in the UK and maybe most of the English speaking world (and maybe also most other countries), people are conditioned to using an x to mark their selection when confronted with several choices, or a tick mark for true if there's only one choice (sometimes people tick checkboxes, but this usually extends past the edge of the box and can easily get messy) but is seems culturally in Japan they've always used the circle instead.

Similarly, using O for off has been a convention on power switches for a long time (again, at least in the UK), so it also makes sense as a cancel button.

Conversely, there's also use good precedent for X to indicate wrong in the UK, but I think it's only really when there's a choice between cross and tick.

I guess for the original PlayStation, it was always intended that O was confirm and X was cancel, and only got changed for non-Asia when the international Sony offices complained about it being culturally confusing.

[vmladenov]

I find it amusing that Sony’s “accept” button matches Nintendo’s (A) placement but only in Japan.

[ecshafer]

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.

[c-hendricks]

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.

[m_mueller]

I'm thinking it has to do with how we use X to fill in choices in a form. And btw. that's a common mistake to make in Japan - never fill in forms with X there, use maru instead.

[irdc]

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]

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 :-)

[bradrn]

> 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]

When you're in vi (or vim) normal mode, x does delete characters.

[mmcconnell1618]

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?

[ognyankulev]

I can confidently say that Elon's X won't become Japan's WeChat.

[bArray]

> 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

[floxy]

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]

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.

[failuser]

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.

[kridsdale1]

The truth may have died with Steve.

[bmacho]

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.

[Sharlin]

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]

It did however close the window if you double-clicked it, which carried over into newer versions of Windows too.

[evaneykelen]

Surprising that the article doesn’t mention the word eXit.

[tezza]

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

[furyofantares]

Yeah, when we got Windows 95 I taught this to my parents: to exit you "x it".

[Garlef]

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.

[ksherlock]

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?

[RodgerTheGreat]

This: https://i.imgur.com/rjfxoRy.gif

[wolfgang42]

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.)

[CharlesW]

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.

[signaru]

Back in the early 2000s, I had a Windows 3.1 386 machine to myself as my family was using the new PC at the time. The glaring difference to me was the missing "X" so I programmed a small window that would dock on the corner of the active window and provide an X close button (as well as maximize, minimize as the real ones were now obscured by that window). It was very hacky-spaghetti Visual Basic code using whatever I can figure out from WinAPI documentations I could find and I was too inexperienced back then. But it worked. My older brother didn't realize the "X" wasn't supposed to exist and it even ended up getting bundled with someone's Calmira fork. Good times.

[midoridensha]

This headline is deceptive: it starts with "X to Close". When I first read this, I thought this means that X (formerly Twitter) was closing. Then my urge to cheer loudly was suddenly quashed when I read the rest of the headline.

[shaunxcode]

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??

[tyingq]

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.

[kridsdale1]

That doesn’t sound like a fumble. That that sounds like a successful growth hack.

[ChrisArchitect]

Bunch of previous discussion from 2014:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8171340

[ChrisArchitect]

Including a screenshot of NeXTSTEP in 1988 with an [x]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8171375

[n3storm]

Reading artile with this Fwm4 theme https://www.xfce-look.org/p/1211669/ and saying "really? atari? maru?"

[ensocode]

The twitter re-branding really makes sense to me now.