Applications can occasionally become unresponsive, freezing or locking up unexpectedly. When this happens, it can disrupt your workflow and leave you without an easy way to close the app. In macOS you can use the Force Quit feature to force a frozen app to close.

To do this, press CMD Option Esc on your keyboard to open the ‘force quit applications’ window:

From the ‘force quit applications’ window, select the app that isn’t responding then click ‘force quit’. This will terminate the offending app.

You can also force quit a non-responsive application from the dock. To do this right click on the app’s dock icon.

From the popup menu, select ‘force quit’.