Once in a while, you have to quit or force quit apps even on Mac, which famously doesn't fully quit apps when you hit the red button in the top-left corner of an app's window. In Windows, the red button quits the app completely, but Macs prefer to keep apps hidden rather than quitting them outright. Luckily, there are still a number of ways to fully close out of an app. Here's how to quit apps on your Mac:
The simplest way to quit any Mac app is to use a keyboard shortcut. Press Command-Q to quit the app that's currently running in the foreground.
The menu bar offers another easy way to quit Mac apps. When an app is in the foreground, click its name in the menu bar (it'll be to the right of the Apple icon). Click the Quit button from the drop-down menu to quit the app.
If you have a lot of apps to close, you can use keyboard commands to make quitting them all faster and easier. Start by pressing Command-Tab and not letting go of the Command key. You'll see the app-switcher window. Keep hitting Tab until you've selected the app you want to quit. Keep holding the Command key and press Q. This will quit the selected app. To quit multiple apps, just keep selecting the app you want to close with Tab and pressing the Q button. When you're done, release Command.
When I have four or five apps to quit, I just open the Command-Tab switcher and keep pressing Q until all of them are gone.
You can also make your Mac actually quit apps when you press the red button in the top-left corner of the app's window. This is how Windows works, and some people may find it useful to replace the Mac's default red button behavior. I like to use an app called Swift Quit for this, since it lets you quit most apps when you press the red button. The app is free and it lets you exclude certain apps from the quit behavior, which is nice to have.
As someone who has a MacBook with 8GB RAM, I can't afford to let apps run in the background indefinitely. It's why I use MagicQuit to force inactive apps to quit automatically. You can ask MagicQuit to ignore some apps and set an inactivity timer, too, which means that it'll quit those apps after they've been inactive for a while.
Sometimes, an app can freeze and leave you with no choice but to force-quit it. When an app is frozen, the easiest way to do this is to right-click its Dock icon and select Quit. In a second or two, the offending app will close.
Alternatively, you can press Command-Option-Escape to force-quit Mac apps. This opens a small window that lists all open apps. Select the unresponsive app and click Force Quit to stop running it.
Your Mac ships with Activity Monitor, which lets you monitor all running apps and close unresponsive ones. Press Command-Space to launch Spotlight search and search for Activity Monitor. Open the app and it'll list all running applications. Select the unresponsive app and click the X button in the top bar. This will open a pop-up window, where you can select Quit or Force Quit depending on what you need.
You can use the following Terminal command to quit any Mac app:
killall AppName
Replace AppName with the name of the app you wish to quit and Terminal will handle the rest.
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