Sometimes when an application stops responding, you are left with no other option other than forcing it to quit. Here is how to force quit an application on your Mac.
Force Quitting an Application In Mac OS X
You’re surfing the web and you click on a link, and you wait for a few minutes and click again, and again, but the page will not come up and then and the web browser freezes. Perhaps you are working on a software application and it stops responding and you don’t find a way to make it run again. So what should you do? In such cases, you can force your applications to quit. You have several ways to do this:
Method 1:
1. Press Command + Option + Escape buttons on your keyboard; a small window appears.
2. In the window select the application you wish to quit and click on Force Quit.
You can also open this window by opening the Apple menu and selecting Force Quit.
Method 2:
Control-click or right-click on the icon in the Dock of the not-responding application and select Force Quit.
When you attempt to force quit the application, in most cases it will completely exit. However, there may be chances that it still lives on in the background. You have to go through some more steps to close it completely:
1. Launch Activity Monitor (located in the Utilities folder).
2. Find the application that was not responding in the process list and double-click in the new window and then click on Force Quit.
This method can also force applications that don’t appear in the window to Force Quit or in the Dock. This is useful because sometimes an application does not show anywhere other than the Activity Monitor.
Method 3:
If your application still does not close properly, open the Terminal window (located in the Applications/Utilities folder) and enter the following command:
Killall “name of your application”
Rename “name_of_your_application” with the actual application name then hit the Enter key.
If the name contains a space, remember to add a backslash before it. For example for “Mac OS”, you should type “Mac OX” (without quotes)
It is not always easy to find the application name because often the name that appears is not the real name of the application.
Lastly, if you can’t use any of the above methods or want to force quit an application very quickly, press Command+Shift+Option+Escape. The will force quit the front most application immediately.
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