How to Force Quit an App on Mac: Shortcut, Dock, Terminal

To force quit an app on a Mac, press Option-Command-Esc, select the app in the Force Quit window, then click Force Quit. You can open the same window from Apple menu › Force Quit, or Control-click the app's icon in the Dock and choose Force Quit. Try a normal quit with Command-Q first: Apple explains that a normal quit lets the app finish what it needs to do, such as saving changes, and a forced quit does not.

Force quit is for one app that has stopped responding. If the whole Mac is frozen, or it restarts by itself, that is a different problem; Mac frozen or keeps crashing covers it.

Quit normally before you force anything

An app that shows the spinning wait cursor is often busy rather than dead. A large export, a sync, or a slow network drive can block its window for a while and then recover. Before forcing it:

1. Wait a minute if the app was in the middle of saving, exporting or copying.
2. Click another app's window. If the rest of the Mac responds, the problem is limited to that app.
3. Switch back and press Command-Q, or choose Quit from the app's menu in the menu bar. The app may ask whether to save open documents.
4. If nothing happens after a reasonable wait, force quit it.

A normal quit and a force quit are not the same action with different speeds. A normal quit asks the app to close itself, so it can write its documents, settings and caches in a consistent state. A force quit ends the process immediately, so anything the app had not yet written to disk is gone.

Four ways to force quit an app

On a Mac with a Touch Bar, Esc is on the left side of the Touch Bar (Apple). In the Dock, Apple's Dock guide describes the Control-click route for an app that stops responding and warns that you may lose unsaved changes.

If Finder is the app that stopped responding, select Finder in the Force Quit window and click Relaunch. Finder is part of macOS and restarts itself; you do not force quit it permanently.

Use Activity Monitor for helpers and background processes

The Force Quit window lists apps with a user interface. Many problems come from processes that have no window: a browser renderer, a sync helper, a menu bar utility, or an updater. Activity Monitor shows them all.

1. Open Activity Monitor from Applications › Utilities.
2. Find the process. An unresponsive one is marked (Not Responding) and shown in red (Activity Monitor guide).
3. Select it, then click the stop button in the upper-left corner of the window.
4. Choose Quit first. Apple says this is the same as choosing File › Quit in the app, and the process does not quit if quitting could cause data loss or interfere with another app.
5. Choose Force Quit only if Quit does nothing. The process quits immediately, open files may lose data, and other apps that use that process may have problems.

Some processes belong to another user or to the system. Activity Monitor may ask for an administrator password for those. That prompt is a reason to stop and identify the process, not to type the password and continue. How to investigate unfamiliar Mac processes explains how to trace a name back to its app.

kill and killall in Terminal, as a last resort

Terminal commands do the same thing as Activity Monitor, with fewer safeguards. Use them only when the graphical tools do not respond, and only on a process you have identified.

These commands only look, they change nothing:

pgrep -il appname
ps -axo pid,comm | grep -i appname

Replace appname with part of the app's name. Note the PID, the number in the first column.

To ask the process to quit:

kill PID
killall AppName

The killall manual page (man killall) says that by default it sends a TERM signal to every process with a matching name owned by you. TERM asks the process to exit, and a well-written app cleans up first. Because killall matches by name, it can hit more than one process: a name like Helper may match helpers from several apps.

If TERM does not work, the forced version sends KILL. The signal manual page (man signal) notes that KILL cannot be caught or ignored, so the process gets no chance to clean up:

kill -9 PID

KILL is the Terminal equivalent of Force Quit. Unsaved documents are lost, and an app stopped in the middle of writing a file can leave that file damaged. Do not add sudo to kill a process you do not own. Root-owned processes are usually part of macOS, a security product, or device management, and stopping them can break networking, login or backups.

What a force quit can lose

After reopening, check the document you were working on. If the app keeps a recovery folder or version history, look there before redoing work.

When the app keeps reopening

Force Quit stops one running copy of a process. It does not stop whatever starts it. If an app or helper comes back seconds after you force quit it, something is relaunching it:

• Login items. Open System Settings › General › Login Items & Extensions and check Open at Login and Allow in the Background. Apple describes these in Open items automatically when you log in.
• Launch agents and daemons. A plist in ~/Library/LaunchAgents, /Library/LaunchAgents or /Library/LaunchDaemons can tell launchd to keep the process alive and restart it whenever it exits.
• A parent app. Some helpers belong to a main app, a sync client, or a vendor updater, and that app restarts them.

Repeatedly force quitting a process that launchd is configured to keep alive only produces a restart loop. Turn off the matching login or background item, or quit the app that owns the helper. How to disable startup programs on Mac covers both lists, and App still running after uninstall covers helpers that remain after the app is gone.

Stopping a process from Mole's Status page

If you use Mole, its Status page lists running apps and processes with their CPU and memory use. Click the ellipsis on a row, or Control-click it, to see Terminate and Force Quit:

• Terminate on a running app asks it to quit the normal way, so the app can show its own save prompt. For a process without an app, it sends TERM.
• Force Quit sends KILL. Mole asks for confirmation before either action, and for Force Quit it says that unsaved data may be lost.

Mole does not offer either action for processes that belong to root or system accounts, for executables under /System and other system paths, for Finder, Dock and WindowServer, or for processes whose names match VPN, proxy, security or device-management tools. Those rows show a note instead of the buttons. This is the same choice as in Activity Monitor; it does not stop a launch agent from starting the process again.

What not to do

• Do not force quit an app that is still saving or exporting just because the cursor is spinning.
• Do not force quit an unfamiliar process because its CPU or Memory number is high. Identify its owner first.
• Do not run sudo killall with a generic name.
• Do not treat a force quit as a fix for an app that freezes every day. Update it, check its plug-ins, and report a reproducible case to its developer.

If an app keeps freezing after updates and a restart, Apple's app troubleshooting steps are: quit and reopen it, restart the Mac, install updates for the app and macOS, and then delete and reinstall the app, noting that deleting it can remove data stored inside the app.

FAQ

What is the force quit shortcut on a Mac?

Press Option-Command-Esc. The Force Quit window opens; select the app and click Force Quit. It is the Mac equivalent of Control-Alt-Delete on Windows.

How do I force quit an app on a Mac when the keyboard does not work?

Use the mouse: choose Apple menu › Force Quit, or Control-click the app's icon in the Dock and choose Force Quit. If nothing responds at all, Apple's last resort is to hold the power button for up to 10 seconds until the Mac turns off; unsaved work in every app is lost.

Does force quitting an app delete it or its data?

No. It only ends the running process. The app and your saved files stay where they are; only changes that had not been saved yet are lost.

Why does an app come back after I force quit it?

A login item, launch agent, or parent app is starting it again. Turn off the matching entry in Login Items & Extensions or quit the app that owns it.