Are you seeing the infamous spinning beachball of death? Has an application become unresponsive and needs to be closed? There could be too many processes running at once, or you have not one but two or three problematic apps that are putting too much pressure on your hardware. Luckily there is a very simple way to force-quit all apps, and in fact we can even show you how to quit apps in six different ways.
The Difference Between Quit and Force Quit
Force Quit is usually used to close an app that has stopped responding completely and prevents quitting the app normally. To quit (close) the app, you simply need to press Command + Q to choose Quit from the app's menu in the menu bar. A normal closure of the app will display a prompt (if needed) to save any changes you have made and will quit only after answering this prompt. That option disappears when you force the app to quit, similar to choosing “End Task” in the Control Panel after pressing Control + Alt + Delete on a PC.
Force Quit with Mac Shortcut. To do the same thing but faster, use Mac shortcut keys to close frozen applications. On your keyboard, press and hold Command + Option + Esc. It will immediately bring up a “Force Quit Application” window. Select the frozen application from the dialogue box and select “Force Quit.”. Force Quit Using The Dock. The first and the easiest way to force quit a non-responding application.
Six Ways to Quit an App in Any Version of macOS
- Use a keyboard shortcut: hit Command + Option + Escape to bring up the “Force Quit Applications” window, and select the faulty app.
- An advanced version of the key combination without bringing up the aforementioned window: hit Command + Option + Shift + Escape. You might need to hold down those keys for a second or two.
- Use the Option + Right Click trick on the targeted app's dock icon to bring up the “Force Quit” option, and select it to kill the app.
- From the Apple menu: hold down the Shift key while clicking on the Apple menu, and you'll see “Force Quit [application name] in the drop down menu. This isn’t the most effective method, however, as unresponsive apps may have inaccessible menus.
- Use Activity Monitor: if you keep an eye on your Mac's resource hog, Activity Monitor is the best tool to spot unresponsive apps and quit them. Launch Activity Monitor if you haven't already done so and, in the CPU tab, select the process that is using most of the processor's resources and click the “Quit Process” button.
- Use Terminal: this may be the preferred method for advanced Mac users, but it's easy to get used to once you have got the taste for working with Terminal. If you have tried all the above without success, you can always turn to Terminal and type the following command:
killall [processname]
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Some Mac optimization apps such as CleanMyMac include a handy system monitoring features. Since it keeps an eye on your system, CleanMyMac notifies the user if it spots an unresponsive app and offers to quit it via the notifications window.
How to Quit All Open Apps at Once
macOS includes a very handy feature called Automator, which is used in this trick to close all running applications. And it can also be tweaked by adding exceptions.
- Launch Automator by typing its name into Spotlight, and hit return when you see it in the search suggestions.
- Hit Command + N to initiate a new action.
- Choose to create a new “Application”.
- In the search box, type “quit”, then drag and drop the “Quit all applications” into the right side of the app window.
- Hit “Save”, and name it something like “Quit All Open Apps”.
With this you have created a new app with a single purpose: to quit all apps. The best part of all is that you can fine tune it by adding exceptions. In our example, the exception was Spotify. Isn't that fun?
Windows Quit App Shortcut
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Listing below the options to force quit Mac App shortcut. Pick your way to close the unresponsive apps in Mac.
If you are a Mac user, you may have encountered an unresponsive app on your Mac which needs to be closed.Here below you can see certain methods to Force Quit Mac Apps.
1. Force Quit Mac App using Apple menu
You can access Force Quit a non-responsive Mac app from the Apple menu as below.
Click the Apple icon from the top left corner and then choose Force Quit from there. This opens the Force Quit Applications window, which provides a convenient list of all of your open applications, denoting any that are not responding.
Highlight the troublesome app and click the Force Quit button to close it.
2. Force Quit Mac App by Keyboard shortcut | Force Quit Mac Shortcut
You can use a Keyboard Shortcut for Force Quit ApplicationsWindow in Mac OS X.Shortcut to force quit Mac App is key combination >> Command-Option-Escape
To close an unresponsive app on your Mac, you can bring up the Force Quit window with the keyboard shortcut and that keyboard shortcut is Command-Option-Escape.
3. Force Quit option in the Dock
For the apps with their app icons in the Dock, go to the Dock at the bottom of the screen and find the icon of the app
Right-click to bring up the contextual menu. You can see Quit option at the bottom of the context menu.
Click Quit to force quit the App.
![App App](https://www.wiselyguide.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/shortcuts-1-7.jpg)
4. Force Quit From Activity Monitor
Activity Monitor is used for checking how much system resources a sluggish or unresponsive mac app is consuming.While using Activity Monitor we can Force Quit the app right away from within the Activity Monitor only.
For that, in Activity Monitor highlight the app you want to close
Then click the X button in the top left corner of the Activity Monitor window and then click the Force Quit button.
Click the Force Quit button
5. Quit Application with Terminal
This is an easiest method to force quit the application in Mac if you know the command. You can easily make it as it is not tough though. This guide is to force to quit application using Mac with the terminal. So follow these steps.
Quit App Shortcut Mac Os
In the first step you just need to open the Terminal if you don’t then open the Terminal from the Applications> Utilities> Terminal.
After launching Terminal you have to use the command to force quit on Mac. So, here you can use two commands to force quit an application in Mac.
Killall [processname]
Example: Killall Google Chrome
Example: Killall Google Chrome
Kill-9 [pid]: Input kill- 9 program id.
Example : kill- 9 program id
Example : kill- 9 program id
Quit App Shortcut Mac Screenshot
These are the command that you need to use to force quit the running application in Mac.
Summary
Force Quit App Mac Shortcut
Hope this article was helpful to you to force quit unresponsive Mac Apps.Force quit is required when an app does not respond for long. But you should be careful with force quit since you won’t get any warning and may lose any unsaved changes.Do follow us for similar technical guidance.