Mac Kindergarten

In the previous post we looked at the difference of closing a window and closing a program. Today we will look at the dark side of a closing a program - terminating it.

In general the programs, you run on a Mac, are quite stable. However, sometimes they can crash and become unresponsive to user input. This is the time, when you have to terminate a program.

If a program does no longer recognize your actions or you are unable to quit an application the normal way (as described here), you need to do the following.

1) Don’t panic
Only terminating one program will not bring the rest of the operating system down. It will, well, terminate the one program.

2) Bring up the the window with all open programs, by pressing the following combination:
command-option-escape

Hint: You don’t need to press these keys at the exact same time. You can start by pressing and holding command, then press and hold option and finally press escape.

This will give you a window, looking something like this:

To force a frozen application, highlight it and click on Force Quit to make Mac OS X shut down the application for you.

Important: This causes a loss of data, that you have entered before (without saving), so only use this method if you only have to. This should only be used, if you can not quit an application by selecting Quit from the application menu or pressing its shortcut, command-Q.

Good news is, you can try it out now, nothing is happening to your active applications, only by bringing up this window. You will also see that you can only “Relaunch” Finder, since it’s the access to all the files on your Mac and therefore always needs to be present.

Final note: Sometimes you just need to be a bit patient. Certain actions can take some time for an application to finish. During that time the program might seem to be unresponsive. Just hang on for a minute and get yourself a coffee. If the program is still running in circles, after you came back, it’s time for you to be merciless!

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Tags: quit, terminate

Related posts:

Quick Tip: Shut down / Restart without the confirmation dialog

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 20th, 2008 at 5:36 pm and is filed under OS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.