Quitting a Stalled Application

Q: How do I quit an application that seems to be unresponsive or frozen? Is there something like Ctrl+Alt+Del for my Mac, or do I have to restart?

A: There are a couple quick ways to quit an application that seems to have conked out on you. As long as the rest of your applications seem fine and your keyboard and mouse still work, it probably is just the one application causing problems, and you can quit just that one application.

One option you have is to right-click (or control-click: I originally wrote command-click here, but have discovered I was in error!) on the application’s icon in the dock. This will bring up a menu, including an option to quit the application if it is unresponsive. Actually, you can right click dock icons anytime and get a menu of options for that application, including a normal “Quit” even if the application is running fine!

Another option is to press Command+Option+Escape. This brings up a force-quit dialog box. Simply select the application you’d like to quit, click the Force Quit button, and you’ll be on your way.

Occasionally, force quitting an application will bring up a dialog telling you that a program was quit while unresponsive, or that there was an error. It will then offer you a chance to submit the information about what caused the problem to Apple. If you take a moment to jot down what you were doing and click “send” this error reporting program will send data to Apple about your computer (don’t worry, it’s not private data like your credit card information; just data about what kind of computer you have and any internal logs the computer might have of what it was doing when your application died). Whether you do this is up to your personal preferences, but submitting errors like this does help Apple to find bugs that might lurk in the software and make sure that the next update is even better!