How to Stop Accidentally Quitting Mac Applications
This happens at least once a day, whenever I’m working on something important right now: I accidentally clear Command + Q instead of Command + W to close the browser tab and exit Chrome. Sigh.
While just restarting your browser and going back to viewing / r / aww is n’t all that frustrating, accidentally hitting Command + Q in other applications can be a little frustrating, especially if you haven’t saved your work for a while. Fortunately, there is a way to prevent this while still retaining the usefulness of Command + Q. (Only quitters reassign a key command to something else.)
SlowQuitApps works exactly as its name suggests. Now, instead of just pressing Command + Q to kill the program, you need to hold Command + Q for a second. A small circular countdown appears on the screen, closing the application when it finishes. That’s all.
While this delay will be a little annoying if you want to close multiple apps at once, you’ll be much happier if you don’t accidentally delete something you’ve been working on in the last hour because you closed the app prematurely. Ouch.
And, as the developer of the utility notes, you can always set the “hold” time to whatever you want (in milliseconds), and you can also whitelist certain applications so that they close as soon as you press Command + Q – without delay. needed.
If you think you will be tweaking the app’s settings, I recommend installing it via Homebrew , which will make the process much easier. If you’ve already brewed, just open Terminal and type:
$ brew tap dteoh/sqa
$ brew cask install slowquitapps