Quitting Programs
In Macintosh lingo, you don’t “exit” a program when you’re finished with it, you “quit” it. And the command to do so isn’t in the File menu—it’s at the bottom of the Application menu. But Mac OS X offers two much more fun ways to quit a program:
Right-click a program’s Dock icon to make its shortcut menu appear. Then choose Quit. (Or, if you do the click-and-hold thing on a program’s Dock icon, a Quit button appears just above your cursor.)
When you’ve pressed
-Tab to summon the “heads-up display” of
open programs, type the letter Q without releasing the
key. The highlighted program quits without
further ado.
Force Quitting Programs
Mac OS X is a rock-solid operating system, but that doesn’t mean that programs never screw up. Individual programs are as likely as ever to freeze—or, rather, to hang (to lock up and display the “spinning beach ball of death” cursor). In such cases, you have no choice but to force quit the program—the computer equivalent of terminating it with a blunt instrument.
Doing so doesn’t destabilize your Mac; you don’t have to restart it. In fact, you can usually reopen the very same program and get on with your life.
You can force quit a stuck program in any of several ways:
Click-and-hold on the program’s Dock icon, or Control-click it, or right-click ...
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