3 Ways to Force Quit an App on the Mac

In this video, we’re going to look at three different ways you can force quit an app on the Mac, let’s go over to my Mac, and see how we can force quit apps that we’re having a problem with. Now, if you’re having a problem with an app, the first thing that you’ll probably want to do or what I would recommend doing is quitting that app. You probably know this, I’m sure you know this.

But all you have to do to quit an app is just go up under the menu bar, and then you go over to quit. But also, what you can do is go to the dock to quit an app, I go down to the dock here to calendar. And if I click and hold, you’re going to see quit. Now let’s say you try this and that app doesn’t quit. There’s a problem with it. It’s locked up. Now what do you do? How can you quit that app? Well, then what you need to do is you need to force quit that app. So how do you do that? Well, basically, my favorite way is through the dock.

Once again, if I go down to the dock, let’s say I can’t quit out of the Calendar app here, I need to force quit it. The way that I usually do it when I do have a problem is by going down to the dock here. And when you click and hold, as you know, we have quick. But if you hold down the Option key, watch what happens, I’m going to hold down the Option key here, we can see a change to force quit, I let go the Option key, it goes back over to quit, I press the Option key, I’m still just clicking and holding on my trackpad. Or if I had a mouse, I’d use the mouse. But now when I hold down the Option key in addition to that, we have force quit. So now all I need to do is just let go of both the key and the trackpad. And it just force quit that app.

That’s the way that I will usually do it is through the dock. Any app that you have open is going to be in your dock. So all you have to do is just hold down the Option key and click and hold and you’re going to see force quit. I mentioned that there were three different ways to do this to force quit an app. Another way is through the Apple menu bar. When you use this method, I’m going to go up to the Apple menu bar in the upper left hand corner, and you go over to force quit, what you’re able to do is see all of your open apps, and then you can force quit any of those apps.

So I’m going to select this, we have a window that opens up and from here, I’m able to see all of my different apps, I select the one that I want to force quit. So let’s go over to male here. And now all I need to do is click on force quit here. And when I do I have to confirm that I want to force quit it. What it will do is it’ll force quit that app. And now we can see that app is no longer open the mail app. Now the nice thing about this method is we can do this from within any app if I was in another app. Let’s go over to Numbers here. I’m in this app. And now what I’d like to do is go to force quit, maybe I’m having a problem with an app that’s in the background.

I can go up to the Apple menu, we can do this from within in the app, and then you’re going to see force quit. And now we have that window and I can force quit any app including the Numbers app. Now I mentioned that there were three ways. Another way is through a keyboard shortcut. Now usually what I will have to do is look up this keyboard shortcut. But if you love keyboard shortcuts, you may want to memorize this. What keyboard shortcut is it? Well, again, we go up underneath the Apple menu, and then we go over to our force quit. And if we go over to the right, you’re going to see what the keyboard shortcut is. Basically, it’s the Option key command key and then the Escape key. So it’s those three keys. And when I use those three keys, what it’s going to do is open up that same window where I can see all of my open apps, and I can force quit any one of them. So let’s go ahead and do that I’m in the Numbers app, all I have to do is just use the option command, and then the Escape key.

And from here, I’m able to force quit any app. Again, I could do this from within any app. If I’m in the Finder. Let’s go ahead and hide Numbers. I’m in the Finder here, I want to force quit the love keyboard shortcuts, option, command escape. And now all I need to do is just select which app I want to force quit, click on it and then I could confirm it. And that app will be forced quit. So those are three different ways to force quit an app my favorite way is through the doc. All you have to do is hold down the Option key click on the app that you have no problem Going with and you really only want to do this. When you’re having a problem with an app. When you force quit an app, it is not going to save any changes. So those are the three different ways that you can force quit an app on the Mac. I hope you found this helpful.