OS X Mavericks: The Missing Manual

Logging Out, Shutting Down

If you’re the only person who uses your Mac, finishing up a work session is simple. You can either turn off the machine or simply let it go to sleep, in any of several ways.

Sleep Mode

If you’re still shutting down your Mac after each use, you may be doing a lot more waiting than necessary. Sleep mode consumes very little power, keeps everything you were doing open and available, and wakes up almost immediately when you press a key or click the mouse.

To make your machine sleep, do one of the following:

• Close the lid. (Hint: This tip works primarily on laptops.)

• Press the power button () on your Mac. Tapping that button makes both laptops and desktops drop off to sleep instantly.

• Hold down the power button () for two seconds. You get the box shown in Figure 1-27; hit Sleep (or type S).

  

  Figure 1-27. Once the Shut Down dialog box appears, you can press the S key instead of clicking Sleep, R for Restart, Esc for Cancel, or Return for Shut Down.

• Choose →Sleep. Or press Option-⌘-.

• Press Control-. In the dialog box shown in Figure 1-27, click Sleep (or type S).

• Just walk away, confident that the Energy Saver setting in System Preferences will send the machine off to dreamland automatically at the specified time.

Tip

Ordinarily, closing your MacBook’s lid means putting it to sleep. And, ordinarily, putting it to sleep means cutting it off from the world. But OS X’s Power Nap feature lets your Mac stay connected to your network and to the Internet, even while it’s otherwise sleeping. It can download email, back up your stuff, download software updates, and so on. For details, see Checkbox Options.

Restart

You shouldn’t have to restart the Mac very often—only in times of severe troubleshooting mystification, in fact. Here are a few ways to do it:

• Choose →Restart. A confirmation dialog box appears; click Restart (or press Return).

  Tip

  If you press Option as you release the mouse on the →Restart command, you won’t be bothered by an “Are you sure?” confirmation box.

• Press Control-⌘-.

• Press Control- (or hold down the button) to summon the dialog box shown in Figure 1-27; click Restart (or type R).

Shut Down

To shut down your machine completely (when you don’t plan to use it for more than a couple of days, when you plan to transport it, and so on), do one of the following:

• Choose →Shut Down. A simple confirmation dialog box appears; click Shut Down (or press Return).

  Tip

  Once again, if you press Option as you release the mouse, no confirmation box appears.

• Press Control-Option-⌘-. (It’s not as complex as it looks—the first three keys are all in a tidy row to the left of the space bar.)

• Press Control- (or hold down the button) to summon the dialog box shown in Figure 1-27. Click Shut Down (or press Return).

• Wait. If you’ve set up the Energy Saver preferences (Color Tab) to shut down the Mac automatically at a specified time, then you don’t have to do anything.

The “Reopen windows” Option

In the Shut Down dialog box illustrated in Figure 1-27, you’ll notice a checkbox called “Reopen windows when logging back in.” That option does something very useful: The next time you start up your Mac, every running program, and every open window, will reopen exactly as they were at the moment you used the Restart or Shut Down command. The new option gives the Mac something like the old Hibernate feature in Windows—and saves you a lot of reopening the next time you sit down to work.

If you turn off that checkbox when you click Restart or Shut Down, then your next startup will take you to the desktop, with no programs running, as though this were still some year between 1984 and 2010. And if you want the Mac to stop asking—if you never want your programs and windows to reopen—open →System Preferences→General, and turn on “Close windows when quitting an application.”

Log Out

If you share your Mac, then you should log out when you’re done. Doing so ensures that your stuff is safe from the evil and the clueless even when you’re out of the room. To do it, choose →Log Out Casey (or whatever your name is). Or, if you’re in a hurry, press Shift-⌘-Q.

When the confirmation dialog box appears, click Log Out (or press Return) or just wait for 1 minute (a message performs the countdown for you). The Mac hides your world from view and displays the Log In dialog box, ready for its next victim.

Tip

Last time: If you press Option as you release the mouse on the →Log Out command, you squelch the “Are you sure?” box.

Logging out is described in much more detail in Chapter 13.