…To MacBook

When an application in OS X is stalling on you and you have given up on regaining control of it, the best thing to do is kill it before it takes down your whole machine. Usually you would right click on the application icon in the Dock and choose the menu item “Quit” or “Force Quit” if available and that should do the trick.

Dock Menu When Right Clicking Application

Or you could click on the top left corner “apple” icon which will bring up a menu where you will see something called “Force Quit”. Choosing that option will open a small window with a list of the running applications which you can forcibly kill.

Force Quit Applications

Sometimes though a key component of OS X fails on you which you don’t have an option to force quit like the above mentioned methods. I came to such a situation when the Dock froze on me the other day. It just would not come up at all. Today I had a similar situation when I had cover flow switched on in the finder while I was browsing an external hard drive that has 20 gigs of hundreds of subfolders inside hundreds of subfolders that contain thousands of photos. Cover flow could not handle this and it wouldn’t allow me to do antyhing else either. I had an application crunching data for the past 5 hours so restarting the machine was definitely not an option. I needed a way to cleanly kill Finder without destroying any other work going on. In situations like this you need to go beyond the GUI and directly to the terminal. Yes, I know, now that I am writing this article, I noticed that the “Force Quit” application actually has Finder as an option but being someone from a linux background I immediately go to Terminal for anything I need rather than look for GUI solutions.

What you need to do is find the PID (Process ID) of the application you need to kill. To do this, type the following in Terminal:

ps aux | grep Finder

The result of that command will be something like:

sergemadenian   131 97.1 25.9  1213744 542124   ??  R    Fri12PM  54:49.70 /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/MacOS/Finder -psn_0_40970
sergemadenian  3932   0.1  0.0   590472    192 s000  R+   10:07PM   0:00.00 grep Finder

“ps aux” is the command that prints out all the currently running processes from all users. ” | grep Finder” will restrict the results of the “ps” command to show only the lines that contain the word “Finder”.

From the above result you can tell that the Finder application is question is the first line and I have set the PID in Bold and red “131″. You can also tell that this process is struggling because immediately after the pid we see the CPU and memory usage which in this case is “97.1 25.9″ (those are percentages).

Now that we know the PID (131) all you need to do is run the command:

kill -9 131

“-9″ tells the OS to kill immediately. That took care of the offending Finder window and I noticed that a new Finder process had been kicked off by the OS. If a new process had not automatically been kicked off, I would have had to start it manually by running the command that was running before which I’ve marked in blue and bold ”

Same process applies to any application including the Dock. All you need to do is find the specific PID by changing what you filter with grep. For the Dock as an example, you will need to run:

ps aux | grep Dock

Remember that the PID is not a universal number (that is your Finder application will not have 131, even my computer will have a different PID for Finder when I restart it) so you need to always find the unique PID running at the time.

Here’s another post that will be a short one for mac OS X. The best way to control what will run on startup is to go to System Preferences -> Accounts Pick the user you want to modify the startup list for and choose the “Login Items” tab. You should see something like this:

Account Login Items

At this point just pick the application you want to stop running on startup and click on the “-” sign to remove it from the list.

While using the macbook I’ve picked up a few keyboard shortcuts that I now use all the time. Here is a list of them:

1. Command+tab: to switch between different applications. This is similar to window’s alt+tab. You can hold down the command button and press/release tab and a prompt will come up to show you all the currently open programs. If you press and release the tab button it will then go to the next program and so on until you find the one you want and you let the command button go. This is extremely useful when you have multiple applications open and switching between them often. The biggest difference between windows and linux is that you switch between different application and not different windows of an application. For example if you have three different windows of firefox open comman+tab will not switch between those windows whereas alt+tab on other systems will. Mac OS X has a different keyboard shortcut to accomplish just that and it’s the next on the list.
2. Command+~: Switching between different windows of the same application. Just as the case specified above, when you have three windows of firefox open and you want to switch between then, you just use the command+~ shortcut.
3. Command+C: Copy.
4. Command+V: Paste.
5. Command+X: Cut.
6. Command+Q: Quit the current application. This is similar to pressing Alt+F4 on a windows machine but the greatest difference is that with Alt+F4 you only close the current window or instance of that application you are looking at, whereas with Command+Q you are quitting the whole application. If we continue our example of having three firefox windows open, on a windows machine Alt+F4 will close the current window and when you are at the last window it will quit the whole application. On a macbook Command+Q will wuit the application closing all three windows at once. Just like Command+Tab there is a window specific shortcut and that is next.
7. Command+W: Close only the current window of an application. This key is what is probably the closest to Alt+F4 on a windows machine because it will close the current window of the application you are on. Unlike windows’ shortcut though it will not quit the application if you close the last window. You will notice that the application is still showing as active in the Dock as well as the menu bar showing up at the top. If we follow the firefox example, closing the last window will still keep firefox open and you could open firefox again very fast because it’s still running in memory. You could use the next shortcut to open the new widnow.
8. Command+N: Open a new window of the application. This is application specific.
9. Command+Space: Open the spotlight prompt. You can use spotlight to find any files or even start up an application for you. Once you get used to this you will see that you rarely use finder or even the Dock to start your application. you want to open up firefox, just press Command+Space and then start typing the name “fire” you won’t even need to finish it and you’ll see firefox come up in the list. Use the arrow keys to go up and down the list to highlight the firefox Application and press enter.
10. Command+Shift+3 and Command+Shift+4: Take a screenshot. For more information look at our screen capture post.
11. Shift+Fn+Left Arrow: Home. This works in different ways on different application. I use terminal a lot and in terminal it will be like pressing “Home” on a keyboard and go to the beginning of the command. In other applications I’ve seen it go to the top of the text (like this input box in the browser jumps to the first character). In other applications you also don’t need to press the Shift key but you do in terminal.
    (Edit: Peter Morgan recently posted a comment pointing out that point 11, 12 and 13 do not need the Shift key to work if you are using Mac OS X 10.5.6. Thank you Peter for the info )
12. Shift+Fn+Right Arrow: End. Works the same way as the home button.
13. Shift+Fn+Up Arrow or Down Arrow: Page Up and Page Down respectively. Works the same way as the home button
14. Fn+Delete: Delete. The way the delete button alone works is more commonly known as backspace in other systems, it will delete the text found right behind (to the left of) the cursor. To delete the text found in front (to the right of) the cursor you need to press Fn+Delete.
15. Fn+FX where X is a number between 1 and 12: Issues that function key as pressed. You will notice that the Function keys (F1, F2, … F12) have other uses like dimming the screen, controlling the speaker, starting spaces or expose and so on. Sometimes though you just want to press the F1 button, in those cases you need to use it in conjunction with the Fn key.
16. Ctrl+Eject: Brings up the shutdown prompt to easily issue a shutdown or restart command.
17. Command+Home: Go to beginning of the line.
18. Command+End: Go to end of the line.
19. Command+Up Arrow (Page Up): Go to beginning of file.
20. Command+Down Arrow (Page Down): Go to end of file.

These are the most common keyboard shortcuts that I use and can think of right now. Let me know if you have a favorite one and I’ll add that to the list.