MagicQuit Automatically Closes Unused Mac Applications
As someone who loves trying and writing about new Mac apps, I see a cluttered dock on my laptop quite often. I don’t often close applications manually unless they are actively interfering with my use of my Mac. Unfortunately, when I bought my MacBook M1, I didn’t have enough money to buy the 16GB RAM option, and now I regret it. With about 50 browser tabs open and many apps running in the background, my MacBook sometimes gets sluggish. Of course, connecting to a 34-inch ultrawide monitor won’t help, but I’m not going to give that up.
This leaves me with the painful task of manually closing unused applications to free up RAM space. I reluctantly did this from time to time until I found MagicQuit , a free Mac app that automatically closes unused apps.
How to use MagicQuit
MagicQuit is quite easy to set up and use. When you launch it, the app asks you to specify how long you want unused apps to remain open. I chose two hours because that’s about as long as I need to make sure I don’t use any app for the rest of the session. Once you select the timeout window, MagicQuit will automatically close all applications that have been inactive for longer than the time you set.
What about apps that you want to keep running in the background indefinitely, such as utilities that make connecting to Bluetooth easier ? Luckily, MagicQuit allows you to set exceptions for them. Click the icon in the app’s menu bar and deselect the apps you want to always run.
Naturally, you will worry about losing data when closing applications. While MagicQuit promises not to close apps that contain unsaved data, I recommend deselecting apps that may be doing important work. For example, I removed my image editing app ( Acorn ) from the auto-quit list. It’s worth noting that MagicQuit doesn’t terminate menu bar apps, which is good for me since the menu bar is home to some of my favorite Mac utilities .