The Application Menu

In every app, the very first menu (to the right of the menu) appears with bold lettering and identifies the program you’re using. It might say iTunes, or Microsoft Word, or Stickies.

This Application menu (Figure 6-5) offers a number of commands pertaining to the entire program and its windows, including About, Quit, and Hide.

The first menu in every program lets you know, at a glance, which program you’re actually in. It also offers overall program commands like Quit and Hide.

Figure 6-5. The first menu in every program lets you know, at a glance, which program you’re actually in. It also offers overall program commands like Quit and Hide.

You quit a program by pressing -Q, the keyboard equivalent of the Quit command. (The Quit command is always at the bottom of the Application menu.)

But macOS offers two much more fun ways to quit a program:

MacOS 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 (lock up and display the “Spinning Beachball 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:

The only downside to force quitting a program is that you lose any unsaved changes to your open documents, along with any preference settings you may have changed while the program was open.