5 Ways To Force Quit Apps On a Mac

If an app is misbehaving, you can force it to quit several different ways. Each force-quit method has different reasons why you may want to choose it in specific circumstances.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at how you can Force-Quit Apps on your Mac. 
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Now hopefully you're rarely ever in a situation where you need to force quit an app. This only is necessary if you can't quit an app the regular way. So you should always check that first. For instance in this video we're going to beat-up on the Calculator App. So you should always go to the app's Menu here and look for the Quit option and quit using that. Or the standard keyboard shortcut is Command Q. It's only if this doesn't work that you should consider force quitting an app. 
Now the first way I want to show you is the most straight forward and doesn't involve bringing up any kind of special window or using any special command. It is just using the Dock down below. If you click on an item in the Dock of course it launches the app or switches to that app. But if you bring up the Context Menu you have some options. There are four ways to bring up the Context Menu. You can click and Hold on the icon and it comes up. Or you can Hold the Control Key down on your keyboard and click. Or you can use right click on a mouse or two-finger click on a trackpad. Then you get this Context Menu. You'll see Quit here and that works just like the regular Quit command. But if you hold the Option Key down it changes to Force-Quit.
You can Force-Quit an app without bringing up anything special just right from the Dock. Since every app that you have running should be in the Dock, even if you don't have it there originally, like I've got a bunch here on the right that are not normally in the Dock but they are apps I'm running right now, you should be able to do this with any app. 
Now there's also a special menu for listing the apps that are running and allowing you to Force-Quit them. So let's say we've got the Calculator App running and it won't quit. We go to the Apple Menu and then we go to ForceQuit right here. This brings up this special list of all the apps that are running. We can select the app that we want and then click Force Quit. It's going to give us a warning here and we can continue using the Force Quit button and it will force that app to Quit. It leaves this up here in case we want to quit any others. There are a few advantages to using this window. One is that you can select multiple apps. I can select one like this and the Shift Click to select a range or I can select one and Command Click to select another.  So if for some reason you need to force quit multiple apps in some extreme situation you can do it here. The other advantage is it will actually show you if the app is having trouble. 
So as an example here I've done a bunch of different things in the Print Dialogue Box in the Contacts App. I find that if you click enough buttons usually the Contacts App kind of crashes. So now I can switch away from over the App Switcher. I'll switch to the Finder here. Now I can get to the Apple Menu and ForceQuit. Notice here it shows that Contacts is not responding. It even puts the name of the app in red. So this is kind of conformation that you shouldn't be able to quit this app normally and you need to select it and use Force Quit here. Sometimes this takes a little while to show up. It won't show Not Responding until it doesn't respond after 15 or 30 seconds. But this does give you a little more confidence to know that you are doing the right thing in force quitting the app. You can see if I do it, it force quits and now I can run the app again. 
Now you can also bring up the Force Quit window with a keyboard shortcut. You can see it here in the Apple Menu. It's Option Command and the Escape key. Or if you actually go to the window here it shows you at the bottom. So we can use this. This is handy if an app has crashed, instead of switching to the Finder you can just use the keyboard shortcut to bring this up. Now you can continue to use the keyboard if you want. You can use the Up and Down arrow keys, for instance, to get to the app that you want. Then Return will use that Force Quit button there, since it is the main one, and then Return again will then confirm that you want to quit the app. 
Another way to Force Quit is to do it in the Activity Monitor. So I'm going to run the Activity Monitor. I'm going to launch it here with Launchpad. It brings it up and it will give me, after a few seconds, a list of all the processes that are running. Note under View you can select that All Processes, My Processes, System Processes, and all of that. So make sure you've got something set where you'll see all your Apps, like My Processes. You can also then Search. So you don't have to go through the list here to look for Calculators since there are tons of background processes running. So I can Search for Calculator and you can see it comes up. I can then select it and now I can Force Quit using one of two ways. One is that I can use this button here, which is labeled Stop. But I could also go to the View Menu. Then look for Quit Process. There's a keyboard shortcut, Option Command Q. Either one of those is going to bring up another Dialogue Box. 
This is an interesting one because it gives you the Option to Quit the regular way as well as the option to Force Quit. So sometimes it may be worth trying to quit the regular way using Activity Monitor. For instance if an app is misbehaving and not allowing you to go to the Menu or use keyboard shortcut this could be another way to send it a signal that you want it to gracefully quit. But you can use the Force Quit here and it will force quit that app. 
Another advantage to using Activity Monitor is, of course, you see lots of different background processes and if an app isn't something that you see at the front or maybe if it is a Menu Bar app, like this, you have the ability to select it here and Force Quit it just like a regular app that actually has windows. 
Now one last way I want to show you to Force Quit an app is to use the Terminal. So if we launch Terminal we can use the simple command Killall, that's one word, and then the name of the app. This will do it. Now note if the app's name is more than one word, if there is a space in it you want to put quotes around it. Now an advantage to using this is you can actually put this into a shortcut. So, for instance, I've created a shortcut here that is just Run Shell Script and it is killall calculator. Now hopefully you never need to do this. No app is misbehaving this badly. But let's say you're forced to use some special app for work or for school and you find that it often crashes, well you can always create a shortcut, and in this case I've set it so it is pinned in the Menu Bar. So I've got Force Quit Calculator here in the Menu Bar. So instead of having to use any of those other techniques I can actually run this shortcut which in turn will run the terminal command and force quit the app. It is a pretty extreme measure to take but it may be necessary in some extreme cases. 
Now I do want to show you one last thing. The Finder, of course, is an app itself. But it is always running and it can sometimes crash. Hopefully it never does for you. But if you wanted to restart it, of course, there is no way to Quit or restart the Finder normally. However, you can Hold the Option Key down first and then click and hold on the Finder's icon in the Dock and then Relaunch appears. This only happens if you are holding down the Option Key before you click. Another thing you could do is, of course, go to Force Quit here and the Finder will be listed. When that is selected instead of getting Force Quit you get Relaunch and you can relaunch the Finder there. There is no way to just force quit the Finder since it always needs to be running. So Relaunch is force quit and start up again. 
So hopefully you never need to Force Quit an app. But it is good to know how to do it just in case. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 4 Responses to “5 Ways To Force Quit Apps On a Mac”

Howard Brazee

3 months ago

My wife had a full-screen game that got stuck a few times. I could have gone to my computer to look up the command to access force-quit (I kept forgetting it). But I set up her computer with different desktops (which she never used), and was able to swap right to get a normal desktop where I could access the  and the kill menu.

Richard Reiling

Gary, I don't get the 'relaunch" menu on Finder when I hold Option and then click on the finder icon.????

Gary Rosenzweig

Richard: Make sure you hold Option and then click and hold Finder. A simple click won't bring up the menu at all.

Fragnito Vernon

I'm running Ventura 13.6.3 and sometimes when I wake my iMac from sleep mode (having left my mail app open) I am not able to Quit the mail program, so I have been using the Command Keys to Force Quit. Thanks for the alternative ways to force quit an app.

5 Ways To Force Quit Apps On a Mac

Comments: 4 Responses to “5 Ways To Force Quit Apps On a Mac”

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