How to Force Quit Multiple Mac Apps Simultaneously

How to Force Quit Multiple Mac Apps Simultaneously

You probably know the various by now, but a lesser known capability is that Mac OS allows you to force quit multiple apps at the same time. This can be a great trick when troubleshooting, as well as a just a nice way to quickly force a few different apps to exit if you dont want them open anymore. For example, if you want to force quit out of both Safari and Chrome concurrently, you could to that. Or if you have multiple Mac apps that are acting up and stuck on the not responding beachball, you could cause them to each force quit at the same time. You can force quit multiple apps concurrently on any modern version of MacOS system software by initiating an added step with the . Heres how this trick works: Keep in mind that force quitting apps typically does not save any data in the app being closed, thus it has the potential to lead to data loss from the app that is being forcibly exited from. Accordingly, forcibly quitting multiple apps is best used for troubleshooting purposes and is therefore not a reasonable approach to simply exiting apps, youd want to just close them as usual with a standard Quit procedure. Users can force quit two apps, three apps, four apps, or more, its just a matter of how many you select to force quit. You can also use the Shift key to select multiple apps to quit if they are contiguous to one another, similar to with Shift. You can even technically forcibly quit out of every open app with this approach just by selecting all of them and forcing them to quit, but keep in mind that doing that leads to the apps not closing gracefully and with no chance to save. If you do find yourself wanting to do that often you may want to instead too, which automates the process and prevents you from having to manually select all apps. Outside of using the command line, this is perhaps the easiest way to forcibly quit out of multiple Mac apps concurrently and with minimal effort. This is a trick that Ive noticed virtually nobody knows about, but its quite helpful for many situations, so use it when you need to, or just focus on single apps to if thats more appropriate.