| Tip 222 | Regain Control of a Crashed Mac |
Very occasionally an application might crash so badly that it appears to lock up your Mac. You might see the “beach ball of death,” that spinning color wheel that indicates your Mac is too busy to respond to you.
There are various ways of attempting to regain control, as follows.
Forcing a Quit
If the app has crashed, right-clicking its Dock icon will probably show a Force Quit menu entry. Click this to force the app to quit. If there’s no Force Quit entry, hold down Option, and it will appear.
You can also hold down Option+Command and tap Esc to bring up the Force Quit dialog box. From there you can select the app and click the Force Quit button.
Using a Keyboard Shortcut
The following might work if ...
Get Mac Kung Fu, 2nd Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
