How do I exit a metro app?

Question

So I downloaded and installed the Windows 8 Developer's Preview. I'm very impressed, except for one thing. I don't have touch, and I have this running in a virtual machine. How do I exit one of these full screen metro apps using just a mouse and a keyboard? Right now my only method to exit one of these guys is to send ctrl+alt+del to the machine. I'm sure that's not the right way... anyone figured this out?

Answer 1

In the Developer Preview:

Alt + F4. Still works like a charm.

In the Consumer Preview:

the method mentioned above plus:

1. Move your mouse or finger to the top of the screen {except for the top left extreme and top right extreme}
2. Click/tap and drag to bottom of screen. The app will close when you get to the bottom.

See Microsoft's official video on mouse usage in Windows 8 here. Also a good video to watch is the touch video.

Alternatively, you can pull up the full list of open apps by hovering the cursor in the very top left corner of the screen, then pulling down to display tiles for all open apps. You can right-click on any open app to close it.

Please note that in Windows 8, in some cases apps are not supposed to be closed. This is part of the general Metro experience; however, because of popular demand, Microsoft did add this feature in the consumer preview.

Answer 2

Press the Windows Key, it's like a 'home' button.

It looks like it's you're not supposed to 'close' apps in a traditional sense, and should be in a 'suspended' mode instead this is achieved by just going and doing something else like going back to the home screen...

Answer 3

If you are running Windows 8 in a virtual machine and the host intercepts the Windows key, try carefully moving your mouse to the bottom-left corner of the Windows 8 screen. The Start button should appear.

Answer 4

Here is an answer from someone at MS on this forum thread:

The idea is Metro Style apps are not closed. The system takes care of keeping the apps from consuming background resources automatically. You can examine the app lifetime information in the developer documentation if you'd like. [...] Alt+F4 only works in the dev tools integrated builds as a developer feature and is not a general mechanism.

Answer 5

Nick Josevski gave the answer if you just want to go back to the Start screen, but, if you want to actually close it then the Ctrl + Alt + Del method works as you said. The best approach I've seen however is the good old Alt + F4 combination, which still seems to close applications.

I would have thought there is a better way, but I haven't found it yet.

(Little notice - When I first fired up Windows 8, I had problems closing applications and did try Alt + F4 to get out the plane application with no luck. However, it appears to be working now. I am not sure what was going on earlier and can only guess it was gremlins in the preview!)

Answer 6

The short answer is that you're supposed to leave metro applications as suspended. If you need to free up memory or manage to write something that kills the system, you can kill metro apps using the task manager. I'd assume that they're going to tidy up the behaviour of alt-tab at some point, but for now it's not that nice.

If you're accessing over "mstsc" RDP(Remote Desktop Protocol) and want to go to the start screen but can't hit the start button on your keyboard directly, then Alt+Home might help you out.

Similarly, if you want to kill the application/process use Ctrl+Alt+Delete, then Ctrl+Alt+End should send that combination through.

Answer 7

Starting with Windows 8 Consumer Preivew, you can close metro applications by click and dragging from the top of the application all the way down to the bottom of the screen. The touch gesture works the same way.

Answer 8

I just found a more elegant solution than three-fingered salute... Win+R, then click on the Start icon (Windows icon, bottom left). But I'm ready to use the actual method.