François La Roche emails a nice little tip for quickly quitting an open app that was news to me.
As everybody know, you can cycle through your open apps by hitting ⌘-Tab. What you might not know (I didn’t), is the ⌘-Tab feature has another trick up its sleeve.
You can also close open apps by keeping the
⌘ key pressed and then hitting the “Q” key while cycling over the application you want to close:
François reports that it seems to works with all apps, although not if the app needs to do something before closing like saving a file.
Thanks, François!
I’ve been told this before, but it never worked for me. Seeing it again on this blog, I gave it another try…
Interestingly enough, it did work this time… only I had to press Apple-A, not Apple-Q.
I’m typing this on an Azerty, not Querty, keyboard, so that might be the cause. Anybody else has the same experience?
Just a tip for French user : press a instead of q : the keyboard layout is qwerty even if your keyboard is azerty…. Kind of bugg apple should solve… i normally stumble on these on windobe…..
Laurent
In the same way, H hides an open window.
(Good to see you back, Tim)
I have found over the last year or so that this technique is very useful in killing an unresponsive Safari. It’s much quicker to do this than envoking the force-quit dialog, which we all love to hate.
Glad you’re back, Tim.
This has been a keyboard shortcut for aeons. It is shown on the Quit command on the Application’s menu. The applications has to be the “active”, or topmost window. This shortcut predates OS X; and might have been available on the earliest Mac OS at the Quit command on the “File” menu.
I love this shortcut and it’s one of the things I miss most when I sit down at a windows machine.
Other things to love about ⌘-Tab:
- Once the icon bar is up you can use your mouse to select and click apps instead of cycling. (also not available on Windows, though most users will tell you that it wouldn’t even occur to them that this would be possible.)
- Drag and drop works on these icons, so you can pick up a file from your desktop and then ⌘-Tab and drop it on whatever app you want. These icons represent bigger targets and less travel than the dock icons, as well as potentially being less cluttered.
Along with the whole Apple-Tab thing, Here are some useful things for me:
Apple-` tabs through the list backwords (the key right above the tab)
Apple-esc – exits the list. I find this useful when I might have multiple windows open in Mail (or whatever… let’s keep this on topic) and what I want to do is jump between windows. Instead of bringing up expose, I Apple-tab out of habit I guess. Now I’m stuck with either going forward through the list, or going backwards to get back to Mail. Instead of that, just move from the tab key to the esc key. That will drop you out of the list and back into the application you summoned Apple-tab from.
One exception: the Finder, even if you’ve hacked the plist to make it quittable. (Oh, and just for the record: It’s the command key, not the Apple key, you damn kids! Now get off my lawn!)
I use Apple-Tab a lot but didn’t know about some of these special features. I tried to drop a file on these icons but only got the slash-circle indicating the operation was not allowed. Didn’t matter what app I tried. Even disallowed if the file belongs to the app. Didn’t work for dropping a folder on the Finder icon. Worse, I could esc out of the Apple-Tab display but now I could not use esc to release the file icon. I had to put it on the desktop then manually restore it to the original position.
It might be obvious but Cmd-Skift-Tab cycles the list backwards!
The Esc-trick was nice, thanks.
An edit function I want!
Be Shift it should:-)
Hey I just mishit the keys and got the Media Center to work… by hitting Apple-ESC. Cool when the remote is lost somewhere under a pile of paper…
Nice to read you again Tim. ;-)
BTW, you’re welcome!
François — Nice to post your tips! Thanks :)
Hide your app:
You can also hide open apps by keeping the
⌘ key pressed and then hitting the “h†key while cycling over the application you want to hide.
Instead of ⌘-esc to exits the list – you can use ⌘ .
(this is also usefull if you want to cancel a dialog box).
I conquer!
This has been really useful for me for about three months. For some reason, I seem to remember this not being part of earlier version of 10.4. One thing that does seem to be missing for some time is a keyboard shortcut that will shut down ALL apps at once…
Control-Command-Eject is the equivalent of Quit-Surprise!
It doesn’t work for me, maybe is there a setting in the accessibility options that needs to be enabled ?
Another option… The wonderful Witch combined with PullTab.
Witch is a great switcher, and PullTab lets you assign Apple+Tab to it so you can get rid of Apple’s switcher completely.
Witch has lots of cool features. I think that the recommended settings at They should do that are good suggestions. However, I also recommend turning on the “Cancel” button feature. I put it at the bottom of my list. Oh, and I turn OFF the “Start with the second listed window when triggered” option.
One gripe is that Witch doesn’t have a way to “Hide Others” while in the application switcher. I’m not sure, but I *THINK* that Apple’s switcher may have the ability to do this (by doing Option+Apple+H over an app). Another gripe is that there’s no way to use BOTH Apple+` and Apple+Shift+Tab for moving backwards in the list. Also, Witch does not allow you to drag documents on top of applications to open them. Oh, and while you can use your mouse scroll wheel, it doesn’t roll around the other side of the box, which may or may not be a good idea.
Also, Witch can sometimes act a little slow, but I blame that on QuickSilver. If anyone ever notices that their typing is slow (or their PowerBook fan is coming on a lot), try restarting quicksilver (you can do this by holding down Control while mousing over “Quit QuickSilver” in the QS menus) as it is probably churning 30% of your CPU for reasons not yet understood (it is not indexing).
Another option is LiteSwitch X, but I think that most of LiteSwitch’s good features are already included in Witch (aside from hiding others). Plus, LiteSwitch does some crappy things like mapping Apple+W to Apple+H. They should have just used Apple+H only.
Ted — for some bizarre reason I had to approve this comment of yours, something that I am only supposed to do once for each user and did for you in 1867 or whenever it was that you started posting on Hawk Wings. Odd.
that was a really kewl tip …
especially when i’m travelling and use my macbook pro without the mouse …
thanks for sharing …