How to Force Quit A Program on a Mac

This tutorial is aimed at newcomers to the Mac platform.

Every so often a program on the Mac will become unresponsive or freeze up. In this post I will be using the program FontBook as an example.

In the picture above you will see that FontBook is open – as indicated by the little oval circle underneath the application in the dock.

Typically – to quit the program you can right click on the dock icon and a little menu like the one below will pop up – where you can select the quit option.

But sometimes this just doesn’t work. The program is stuck.

To force the program to quit, you need to click the apple icon in the upper left hand corner of the screen (toolbar) and find the selection called “force quit” in the drop down menu – as shown below:

Another box will then pop that lists all of the programs you are currently running. Click on the application that is causing you grief by not responding. In this example – it is FontBook.

Now click the “force quit” radio button. Yet another box will pop up asking you to confirm that you really do want to quit. If you are sure (and in this case I am) – then click the Force Quit radion button on this pop up window.

You can see that FontBook no longer appears in the dock – as the Mac computer has forced this program to quit.

And there you have it.

Sometimes I will get an error message when I am trying to shut down my Apple Mac computer - that a particularly stubborn program has canceled shutdown. When this happens I always have to use the force quit option to close the program and then reinitiate shut down.

Of course, you must keep in mind that any unsaved changes will be lost when quitting the program.

For those that would prefer to watch this tutorial – here is the exclusive TechnologyNovice screencast: