How to automatically quit apps you’re not using on Mac

Do apps you’re not using slow your Mac down?

Often less than you’d think. macOS is built to keep apps open: memory an idle app isn’t using can be compressed or set aside, and App Nap slows down apps that are in the background and not doing anything visible. An app you opened this morning and forgot about may cost almost nothing.

Some apps cost more. A browser with a lot of tabs, chat and collaboration apps that stay busy in the background, and apps that sync, index or check for updates all keep working when you aren’t looking at them. Each one is small; a dozen of them on a Mac with little memory is the difference between a Mac that stays quick and one that starts to stall. Quitting an app hands all of its memory back at once, which is the one thing leaving it open never does.

How to see which apps are worth quitting

Activity Monitor’s Memory tab. Open Activity Monitor (in Applications → Utilities, or search for it with Spotlight), click Memory and sort by the Memory column. At the bottom, the Memory Pressure graph shows whether your Mac is short of memory: green is fine, and yellow or red means it’s working to make room.

The Energy tab. It shows each app’s Energy Impact, and columns for whether an app is using App Nap and whether it’s keeping the Mac from sleeping. An app high on this list while you aren’t using it is a good one to quit.

The battery menu. On a MacBook, click the battery in the menu bar to see the apps using significant energy right now. It no longer says how long the battery will last; here’s where to see battery time remaining.

If you’d rather keep an eye on it all the time, show CPU and memory in the menu bar and you’ll see when it climbs.

Ways to quit apps on a Mac

⌘Q quits the app you’re in. Control-click its Dock icon and choose Quit to quit one you’re not in. Or hold ⌘, press Tab to move through the app switcher, and press Q to quit the app it’s on. (The switcher moves between apps, not windows; switching between windows of the same app is a different shortcut.) Because Q sits right beside W and Tab, it’s also easy to quit by accident; make ⌘Q hold-to-quit if that keeps happening to you.

Force Quit (⌥⌘Esc) is for apps that have stopped responding. It closes the app without letting it save, so use it only when the normal Quit doesn’t work.

Closing an app’s last window usually isn’t the same as quitting it: on a Mac, most apps keep running with no windows. If you’d like closing the last window to quit the app, that’s a separate fix. And to close everything at the end of the day and bring it all back tomorrow, save and close every app at once.

Which apps to put on the list, and how long to wait

The best candidates are apps you open for one job and then forget: an image editor you used for one picture, a utility you ran once, an app you opened to check something. Give them a short wait. Apps you come back to through the day are better with a longer one, so they aren’t quitting just as you return to them. You can set anything from 15 minutes to 4 hours, and give each app its own time.

Think twice about apps you rely on for alerts. An app that has quit can’t notify you or sync in the background, so a messenger or mail app on the list goes quiet once it quits. Music is less of a worry: by default, an app playing sound counts as in use and isn’t quit.

Only apps on your list are ever quit, the app you’re using is never quit, and time your Mac spends asleep doesn’t count toward the wait. Apps quit the way ⌘Q quits them, so an app with unsaved work asks first rather than losing it.

Apps aren’t the only thing left lying around. If you install apps from disk images, install them in one click and the disk image is ejected and its .dmg moved to the Trash for you — and the Trash itself holds on to disk space until you empty it. And before you unplug a dock at the end of the day, eject every disk at once rather than one by one in the sidebar.

Permissions, and turning it off

More fixes macOS doesn’t give you

One of 47 fixes and 10 apps in MacFixes. Every fix · Every app · Something else your Mac won’t do? Request it.