Wait a few seconds and press the power button again to turn on your device. For this, press and hold the power button till your Mac shuts down. If nothing works, you can restart or force shut down your MacBook as the final resort. Method 7: Restart or Force Shut Down Your MacBook Find the stuck program and note its PID in the second last column.Open Activity Monitor on your Mac by following any of the methods mentioned above (methods 4 or 5).If not, follow these steps to force quit the program on Terminal. You can find an application’s PID in the Activity Monitor in the second last column. However, you will need the Process ID (PID) of the program you want to close. Method 6: Force Quit the Program Using the Command on TerminalĪnother practical way to force quit an application is through Terminal, the command line interface for your macOS. In the new pop-up window, select Force Quit.Click the stop icon ( x) on the top bar.In the list of running programs, select the stuck application. The Activity Monitor window will appear on the screen.Press + + on your keyboard at the same time.Method 5: Force Quit the Program Using ShortcutĪctivity Monitor (also called the Mac Task Manager) can help you force quit an unresponsive application even when your entire Mac screen is frozen. Minimize the program(s) by clicking the Minimize button (yellow button) on the top left of the screen.If you are able to minimize the unresponsive program’s window, using the Apple menu is the easiest method to force quit. Let’s take a look at them: Method 1: Force Quit the Program Using the Apple Menu If nothing happens even after the cursor loads for a long time, it’s time to force quit the program.Īfter trying and testing various methods to force quit programs on Mac, we have come up with a list of the seven best ways to force quit on Mac. In such cases, you may see a background busy pointer or processing cursor.

The cursor is on the screen but is constantly loading.

Sometimes, you can see and move the cursor, but you cannot select any object on the screen.

The program is unresponsive, and you cannot find the cursor to do anything or close it.

The program stops responding, and the screen freezes.

When your mac is stuck, clicking x won’t work. You cannot close a program manually, that is, to click the x button at the top left of the screen.For example, you may consider force-quitting a program on your mac in any of the following situations: Apps can freeze or become sluggish when your MacBook is running too many programs and there is no more memory left to process things. In macOS, the menu bar is at the top of the screen, and it remains after you close a program.Force quitting helps terminate an unresponsive app when it is stuck. Windows puts the menu bar (or, in some cases, the ribbon) at the top of the window for a given application, and it disappears when you close the window. Perhaps the most visible incarnation of this is the menu bar. When you close a window, you close the specific document you were looking at, but the application itself keeps running. On a Mac, a window is treated more like a document than the app itself. This means that when you close a window, you close the application as well (as long as it's the last window of that application that's open). On Windows systems, a window generally equals an application. Here's a quick explainer about how closing windows works on a Mac, along with some information on how to actually close applications when you want to. That's okay: learning any new operating system means thinking in slightly different ways. Longtime Mac users don't even think about it, but anyone coming to macOS from Windows or even Linux-based systems might feel a little bit disoriented. No: this is actually how Macs work, and basically has been since the 1980s.

Mac force quit window