In this quick tip, I've skipped over a myriad of technical detail here in order to highlight these two helpful keyboard combinations, techniques that should always be tried before you reach for the Mac's power switch.Īre there other related situations you'd like to see covered? Let me know. Then hit Return instead of clicking the buton. Then use the up/down arrows to navigate to the app marked in red as "Not responding." Like this:
If you suspect some other app, you can try this to bring up the OS X Force Quit. See: " Frozen: How to Force the Restart of a Mac." If that doesn't work, then your only choice is to force a restart of the Mac. Wait a few seconds for the app to terminate. Because the misbehaving app is likely the frontmost app, you can type, all at the same time: Command key + Option key + Shift key + ESC key Then, it's just the keyboard to the rescue. However, occasionally, a spinning beachball takes control and won't allow you to click an item the way you need to in the list above. Details on that are outside the scope of this quick tip. With some expertise, open a terminal window and terminate the suspect process.Alternatively, try pressing Opt+Cmd+Esc to open the Force Quit window. Run the Activity Monitor.app, identify the misbehaving app, and terminate it. Hold Option (labeled as Alt on some Mac keyboards) until Quit becomes Force Quit click this.Right click the app's icon in the Dock and select Quit.Go to the Apple Menu and select Force Quit.If you can click outside the app and recover an active cursor, there are several common ways to terminate a misbehaving app. One of the more common lock ups I've encountered lately is with Firefox and that spinning beachball of death.
Because you have no control of the cursor to activate a Force Quit or launch Activity Monitor, it's necessary to invoke a keyboard command. That's Apple's colorful cursor that just keeps on spinning, indicating an unresponsive process. From time to time, an app may lock up with a spinning beachball of death.