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by lunchbox 4330 days ago
It can also be thought of as a pun -- when you want to "exit" an application, you "X it".
3 comments

I'd describe that as "verbing" it rather than "punning" it. The verb makes sense too, when you take keyboard short cuts into account. A very common short cut to exit a program (in Windows at least) is File->Exit, which translates to `Alt+F, X` so you do, in fact, "X it".
Wow, I've been saying "X it" for years but never even caught that it sounds like "exit".
No, you don't use a space: "xit name" (http://ex-vi.sourceforge.net/ex.html)

If ex is not your favorite editor, use EX<ESC><ESC> (at least, that is what I think Wikipedia claims. I'm sure any decent TECO user never exits their editor, browsing the web in a browser macro)

[I also checked ed and edlin. They had two commands for exiting: w writes and exits, q quits]