• Although MacOS is unlikely to give you a headache, there are always some stubborn apps that refuse to close when you try to close them the classic way, having to force them to close.
  • Running Force Quit is simple and shouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes, and should get you rid of the offending software, though in a small percentage of cases it’s not enough
  • In that case, you will have no choice but to use the MacOS Activity Monitor

Although it is much less likely that you will have to resort to this kind of tricks in MacOS than in Windows, due to the stability that has always characterized Apple equipment and its operating systems, that does not mean that, from time to time, give you trouble In fact, whether it’s because it’s not responding, or because you want to kill all its active processes, you can always force close an app on your Mac..

Like those of Redmond, the people of Cupertino put at our disposal some emergency exitsdesigned to free the operating system when any of the running applications freezes and does not close.

This makes sense especially if you are one of the people who download the latest versions of macOS when Apple announces its availability, as those first few weeks may be loaded with some bugs. As time goes by, Apple corrects these bugs, but for you it is better to know these tricks.

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As we know, the basic procedure to close applications in MacOS is to right-click on the icon that represents the app in the Menu Bar and select Quit, or press the Command + Q keys in combination. Here, however, we are going to stop at situations in which that usual process is of no use.

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Force close an app in MacOS step by step

If the normal closing of applications does not act in any of them, click on the Apple icon in the upper left corner of the screen, and look for the option Force quit or, well, press combined Command + Option + Esc.

After this step, you will see the box «Force Quit Applications«, where a complete list of each application that is running, or active, appears. It works in a similar way to Windows Task Manager.

Look for the conflicting application within the list, and click on the Force Quit button, which will cause a pop-up window to appear, where you will be asked if you’re sure you want to force quit that app.

As soon as you confirm that this is what you want to do, the app should close completely.

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What to do if that doesn’t work?

If something is preventing you from going all the way to Force Quit, there is still one last solution or trick we can suggest. We need to go to a little used but very useful menu, such as the MacOS Activity Monitor.

You can use Spotlight Search to find the Monitor, like so: in the Finder that comes included, in Applications, double click on Utilities to open the folder and, finally, enter the Activity Monitor.

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As before, you will see a list of currently active processes, and we recommend that you first click on the header that says Process Name, that way, alphabetize active processes. This will make it much easier for you to find the application that is causing the problems.

Once you have come across the software in question, click on the X icon at the top of the list, detailing which application you want to closeforcing it to close in an alternative way to the original.

If the program still refuses to close, you can always restart or reset your Mac, saving everything first.

Were you able to force close a problematic app on your Mac with this tutorial?

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