Switcher Tip: Quitting an Application

On the Mac OS X, when you click on the red X of an application window, Mac OS X just closes that window, it does not exit the application.  (Interestingly, this is the same behavior as on Microsoft’s Pocket PC devices)

To actually exit an application, and free all of the memory and resources that it is using, you need to go to the Menu Bar, select application’s menu and select Quit.  But if you are running many different applications, this becomes a very slow process.

Often, you can also use Command-Q as a shortcut to exit the application.

You can further use the Apple Dock to Quit or Force Quit and application:

• Control-click: (or click and hold) the application icon in the dock, a popup menu will appear, select Quit.

• Option-Control-click: To force quit an application that has crashed, you press Option while the popup menu is displaying - you’ll see the menu item called Quit change to Force Quit. Click that and it will force quit the application.

More info can be found at http://www.apple.com/pro/tips/forcequit.html

Comments

[Joe]

If you want to quit things really fast, hold down Command and then Tab through your open applications. When an application is highlighted, hit Q to quit it. (You're effectively using Command-Q.) If you get good with it, you can quit things very quickly.

[Cris]

Yup -- it works great -- thanks