Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com.
Let me show you how you can force quit apps on your Mac.
I'm using Mac OS 10.9 and let's look at what happens when you want to force quit an app.
So I'm going to run an app here that won't mind being force quit.
It's Calculator.
Say this is some other third party app and you are having trouble with it.
You just want it to quit but for some reason quitting doesn't work from the menu here.
You can't use Command Q and you want it just to stop.
What you want to do then is you want to use the keyboard shortcut Command/Option/Escape.
That brings up this Force Quit Applications dialogue.
It lists all the running applications.
You can actually use this as an application switcher.
I can double click on Safari for instance and it will bring Safari to the front.
But for the one that I've got selected here, I can click Force Quit and it will force it
to quit.
It is going to ask me to make sure I want to do this and then it will kill it.
So that is the simplest, easy, and the first way you should try to force quit an app that
is misbehaving.
Now I should add that when you bring up this window here you can see the list of apps.
If something is truly misbehaving and the system recognizes that it is not working,
it will be in red.
There will be a whole red highlight under it.
Now you just see a white highlight and it is blue when I select it.
But if you see something in red you know there is a problem and you should try to quit it
normally or force quit it here.
Sometimes if your machine is slow and non responsive you might see one or more things
here and that might give you a clue.
Sometimes it might not be the app you expect.
For instance you might be having trouble using iMovie and then you go to Force Quit it because
it is not responding and then you find there is actually another app that is not responding
as well.
You Force Quit that one first and now iMovie has processing power to be able to continue.
So be on the lookout for that.
Another way you can try to force quit an app is to find it here in the Dock below.
You can Control click on it and you can see down here many options including a Quit option.
Try that.
But it is probably going to give you the same result as using Command Q.
However if you hold down the Option key you can see Quit changes to Force Quit and you
can use that to basically perform the same thing as using Command/Option/Escape and selecting
the app.
Another way to force quit that sometimes works when those ways fail is to run Activity Monitor.
So I'm going to run that and it is going to give me all the different apps processes that
are using the computer right now.
So I can list them in anyway I want and I can do it by Process Name which is going to
be a lot easier then to find what I want.
I can usually find it by name there.
And there is Calculator.
I can select Calculator there and one of the things I can do is I can use the Force Quit
button here, right here, and that will quit that app.
So it is as easy as that.
That also works sometimes when you have things like, here for instance, ClipMenu is something
that runs in the background and there are several things that run in the background,
that are not things you can find when you use the Force Quit menu here.
They just don't show up.
You can also search for things as well.
So you can search for things that are running like that ClipMenu.
You can easily find it doing that.
Now if you really need to kill something and nothing else is working you can run the Terminal
app which is what I have done here.
It is just called Terminal.
You can find the app by using top.
The command is top and it will show you all the top processes that are running.
For instance let's launch Calculator here.
We'll see here in this list Calculator and you want to find the Process ID.
In this case it is 56264.
It will be something different every time.
So 56264 we're going to do Control C to quit out of top and issue kill 56264.
You can see that it kills Calculator.
This may work in some cases where nothing else does.