How to force quit on Mac, from the shortcut to the last resort

Press Option, Command and Esc together. The Force Quit window opens, you select the app that has stopped responding, you click Force Quit, and it closes. That's the whole answer, and if it's all you came for, you can stop reading here.

If you've just moved over from Windows: yes, this is the Mac's Ctrl+Alt+Delete. Same reflex, different keys. Ctrl+Alt+Delete opens a screen that also offers to lock the machine, switch user, sign out or restart. Option-Command-Esc closes an app that has stopped listening, and does nothing else.

Try Command-Q first. It costs two seconds

Apple's own instructions lead with this, and the reason is the part most people skip. In Apple's words, when an app quits normally "it can do what it needs to do before quitting, such as to save changes." A force quit takes that away, and whatever you hadn't saved is gone. So press Command-Q, or choose Quit from the app's menu in the menu bar, and give it a few seconds.

It helps to know what the spinning beachball means, because almost everyone reads it as "dead". Apple's developer documentation calls it a hang, "almost always the result of long-running work on the main thread." The app is busy, not broken, and waiting half a minute rescues an unsaved document more often than you'd think.

1. Option-Command-Esc, the one to remember

1. Hold Option (marked Alt on some keyboards), Command and Esc together. If your Mac has a Touch Bar, Esc is at the left end of it.
2. The Force Quit window opens and lists your open apps.
3. Select the one that's stuck. Apps that have stopped responding are flagged.
4. Click Force Quit, then confirm.

The window stays open afterwards, so you can deal with more than one app in a row. One special case: the Finder is always running, so it can't simply be quit. Select Finder and the button changes to Relaunch. That's the one you want when the desktop or a Finder window has locked up but everything else is fine.

2. Apple menu, Force Quit

Same window, no keyboard combination: click the Apple logo in the top-left corner and choose Force Quit. Useful when a full-screen game is swallowing your keystrokes.

3. From the Dock

Control-click the app's icon in the Dock (right-click and two-finger click do the same thing). Apple's instruction is exact: "If an app stops responding, Control-click the app's icon, then choose Force Quit (you may lose unsaved changes)."

If macOS hasn't decided the app is stuck yet, that item reads Quit instead. Holding Option is widely reported to switch it to Force Quit, though Apple's current Dock page documents only the Control-click route.

4. Activity Monitor, for everything without a window

The Force Quit window lists apps: things with an icon and a window. A lot of what runs on your Mac has neither. When a background helper has wedged, or something is working the fan and you can't tell what, Activity Monitor is the tool.

Open it from Applications > Utilities, or press Command-Space and type its name. Select the process in the list; unresponsive ones are marked "(Not Responding)" and shown in red. Click the stop button at the top left of the window, and you get two choices that aren't the same thing:

• Quit is the polite one, the same as choosing File > Quit inside the app. Apple: "The process quits when it's safe to do so. If quitting the process could cause data loss or interfere with another app, the process doesn't quit."
• Force Quit doesn't negotiate. Apple again: "The process quits immediately. If the process has files open, you may lose data."

Pick something that isn't yours and macOS asks for an administrator password. Read that as the warning it is. Several of the busiest names in that list are macOS itself: kernel_task manages heat, and WindowServer draws every pixel you can see. Neither is a program you can usefully close.

5. Terminal, and why you probably don't need it

Every article on this subject finishes with Terminal commands, so here's the honest version. For an ordinary app with a window, kill does nothing the Force Quit window hasn't already done, and it's easier to mistype. It earns its place reaching a process with no icon, no window and no entry in the Force Quit list.

kill sends a signal, which is a short instruction the process may or may not be able to act on. Its default is TERM, signal 15, the manual page's "software termination signal". That's a request, and a healthy app can catch it and save before it exits. kill -9 sends signal 9, KILL, described on the same page as a "non-catchable, non-ignorable kill": the kernel stops the process where it stands, with no chance to save. Which is why you try the first before the second.

You need the process ID, which Activity Monitor shows in its PID column. Then kill 1234, and only if nothing happens, kill -9 1234. Developers who arrived here because a port is stuck want the port-specific version of this instead.

When the app won't force quit at all

Apple's answer is short: restart. Apple menu > Restart. Save whatever is open in your other apps before you do, because this is the moment where unsaved work elsewhere is at risk too.

If it won't restart, force it off: press and hold the power button for up to 10 seconds until the Mac turns off, then press and release it to start up again. On laptops with Touch ID, that's the Touch ID button.

You may have read that Control-Command-Power forces a restart. Apple documents that only for built-in keyboards without Touch ID, which excludes most Macs sold in recent years. Press and hold is the one that applies to yours.

Frozen app, stuck Finder, frozen Mac, kernel panic

These get treated as one problem. They're four, and they want different things.

One app beachballs and everything else works. An app hang. All of the above applies.

The menu bar and Dock stop responding, but the clock still ticks. The Finder is stuck. Option-Command-Esc, select Finder, click Relaunch.

Nothing moves at all. The pointer ignores the mouse, the clock is frozen mid-minute, no key does anything. A whole-system freeze, and there's no force quit available because nothing is left to accept the command. The power button is the only control you still have.

The Mac restarts on its own and tells you it restarted because of a problem. A kernel panic, where macOS has already done the drastic thing for you. Apple's guidance is that unexpected restarts usually come from installed software or connected devices: install available updates, then disconnect peripherals and reconnect them one at a time until the problem returns, then run Apple Diagnostics.

How not to lose the work

Command-S, still, always. Past that:

Apps built on macOS Auto Save and Versions (TextEdit, Preview, Pages, Numbers, Keynote among others) keep old copies of a document. One is saved automatically every hour, more often when you're making a lot of changes, and again whenever you open, save, duplicate, lock, rename or revert the file. After a force quit, reopen the document and choose File > Revert To > Browse All Versions. Apps outside that system, including most of Office and Adobe's, have their own recovery and their own rules.

Browsers are usually kind about this. Safari's History menu has Reopen All Windows from Last Session.

When force quitting becomes a habit

Once is a bad afternoon. The same app, every day, is a symptom, and force quitting it treats the alarm rather than the fire. The causes are boring and findable:

• The Mac has run out of free memory and is swapping to disk, so everything stalls under load. Memory pressure is the reading that tells you, and Chrome is the usual reason it's high.
• One process is pinning the CPU and starving the rest. Why is my Mac slow walks the suspects in order; the same process usually shows up as a Mac that's hot and loud and a battery that empties fast.
• It started after a macOS update, and the background work hasn't finished. Mac slow after an update.
• Too much loads at login and competes for the same machine. Login items and launch agents.

Finding that by hand means opening Activity Monitor after the damage is done and guessing which number was different an hour ago. Plumby keeps the process list with live CPU and memory in front of you, and names anything that has climbed sharply in the last fifteen minutes. You can quit or force quit from there, with the same warning about unsaved work, or pause a process instead of killing it, freezing it in place so you can resume it later. That last one is often what you actually wanted.