While MacOS is overall a very stable operating system, the different apps that you are running can still be stuck or frozen. In such cases, you may want to wait a bit to find out if the app will start to react again. But in other cases, you want to force close an application on your MacBook or iMac.

Force quit key combination for MacOS

If the regular ‘quit’ option does not unblock an app on MacOS, you should try the key sequence Option+Command+Esc (Escape).

The next thing that happens is the window ‘Force quit applications’. The new window will list all of the currently open applications and let’s you choose the option ‘Force Quit’.

This is an alternative of the Task Manager in Windows to force quit an application in case you run into trouble, or must quit an application when it is stuck or not responding.