Hotkeys For Mac Force Quit

Apr 28, 2011 The normal ways to quit a Mac application are to choose Quit from the menu named for the application (e.g. Word, Chrome, VLC, Mail) or to press the keyboard shortcut to Quit, which is Command-Q. Force Quit is a Mac feature to force a Mac program to exit when it won’t respond to these normal ways to quit. Select the program from the dialogue box that you want to quit. Click “Force Quit”. This keyboard shortcut is very easy to remember and simple option to quit applications on Mac. But It is one of the most unsafe methods that may lead you unexpected data loss. These are the 5 shortcuts to force quit Mac application.

If your Mac has frozen, or one of the applications you’re using stopped responding, you can easily get things back to normal by force quitting. When you force quit an app, it will completely close the application in question, as well as all the background processes it’s running. Here are two simple ways you can force quit applications on a Mac using your keyboard:

Using the force quit shortcut

The quickest and easiest way to force quit an app with a keyboard is to use the Mac shortcut keys for closing frozen applications:

On the keyboard, press and hold Command + Option + Esc. This action will immediately open a “Force Quit Application” window.
From the dialogue box, select the frozen application, and then press Force Quit. The app will now be closed.

This is a go-to method for most Mac users, due to its swiftness and efficiency.

Force quitting through the Activity Monitor

Although not many Apple users are aware of this fact, macOS offers an alternative that is nearly identical to the traditional Ctrl+Alt+Del shortcut on Windows, and it might even do it better.

This PC keyboard shortcut is well-known for allowing users to open the Task Manager, where they can track processes, services, applications and performance, and even kill some of them if they aren’t responsive.