How To End Running Apps On Mac

What are startup items?

Startup items, or login items, are services and applications that launch every time you start your Mac. These are applications that sneak into startup items without notice, never asking if you need or want them there. This way you may end up with a dozen apps launching as soon as you turn on your Mac, weighing heavily on its processor and memory capacities and slowing it down. Such items can increase your Mac’s startup time and decrease its performance.

To close a window in Mac OS X, move your pointer over the Close button; it’s the red circular button at the top-left corner of the window. An X appears on the button when you’re in the zone. When the X appears, just tap the trackpad. Sometimes we need to do something else in a hurry. We want to close all of the apps for a few seconds.

Plus, sometimes when you remove an application or a service, it leaves a login item with a broken link. These broken login items are completely useless, cause unwanted messages, and waste your Mac's resources (because they look for non-existent applications). Whether you're running macOS Catalina or El Capitan, or earlier — it's all the same, so just read on.

Show All Running Apps On Mac Using Force Quit Applications Manager. Another method to check all the Running apps and programs on your Mac is through the Force Quit applications manager on Mac. Click on the Apple icon in the top menu bar of your Mac and then click on Force Quit Application in the drop-down menu (See image below). Find Alternative Applications for Mac OS. This is not so much of a tutorial to get your Windows applications on Mac OS, but rather, one of the straightforward solutions. Instead of depending on tips, tricks and hacks to get your software to run on Mac OS, the easiest solution is to migrate to native Mac OS apps.

So, let's go over how to take control of login items, and how to get rid of unwanted, broken or hidden startup items.

How to disable startup programs?

Do you want to stop programs from running at startup? There’s an easy way to remove programs from startup and get your Mac to load faster on launch. The fastest way to turn off startup items on Mac is an app like CleanMyMac X.

  1. Download CleanMyMac for free.
  2. Launch the app.
  3. Open Optimization tab.
  4. Click on Login items.
  5. From the list of apps, disable the ones you don’t need on startup.
  6. Done!

How to change startup programs manually?

Disabling Mac startup programs is possible manually. Therefore, if you have some time and would like to do it yourself, follow the steps below.

Your login items are listed in settings. One of the easiest ways to control startup items is inside System Preferences > Users & Groups.

  1. Open System Preferences.
  2. Go to Users & Groups.
  3. Choose your nickname on the left.
  4. Choose Login items tab.
  5. Check startup programs you want to remove.
  6. Press the “–” sign below.
  7. You’re done.
  8. If you need to add an item back, press “+” and choose the app you’d like add.
  9. Then restart your Mac to see the changes.

How to fix broken startup items?

Broken Mac startup files are left there because some part of apps are left on your Mac long after you’ve moved the app to the Trash. To get rid of these parts and to fix your startup, you’re going to need CleanMyMac again. First, you need to check if they’re among startup items and disable them if so. You can do it following the instructions above. Then you need to remove app leftovers. CleanMyMac works fine on macOS High Sierra and earlier OS.

  1. Launch CleanMyMac.
  2. Choose Uninstaller tab.
  3. Scroll through the list of apps.
  4. If you spot any app that you’ve deleted, check them.
  5. Delete the app leftovers you’ve chosen.

You can also find and remove broken login items with the help of System Junk module:

  1. Choose System Junk tab.
  2. Click Scan.
  3. Review details and click Clean.

Finally, you need to clean your macOS startup items through launch services:

  1. Open Maintenance tab.
  2. Choose Rebuild Launch Services.
  3. Hit Run.
  4. Done.

Once you do it, all broken app data on your Mac will be fixed.

Remove daemons and agents from startup process

If speaking of files, first go to the system folder /Library/StartUpItems. Here you’ll find all the startup files that are being launched with the system. You can delete the login item you think is necessary if you’re totally sure what you are doing.

Also, the /Library/LaunchDaemons folder contains a bunch of preference files that define how the application that is being launched along with the system should work. You might want to delete some of these files as well if you know you don’t need them and removing them is safe.

How To End Running Apps On Mac

The /Library/LaunchAgents contains preference files responsible for the apps that launch during the login process (not the startup).

The above-mentioned folders contain app-related files. However, you can also check system folders to review whether you need some of the system applications to be running on startup:

  1. /System/Library/LaunchDaemons - note that besides preference files this folder contains other important system items that are recommended to keep untouched.
  2. /System/Library/LaunchAgents - most probably, you won’t also find anything worth removing in this folder, however, keeping this location in mind might help you find files related to a problematic app that causes troubles on Mac startup. If you have a problematic application that messes about on login, you can try to trace it back from this folder.

But, if you’re looking for simple ways to remove login items, we suggest using a professional Mac utility. Download CleanMyMac X for free and make unwanted and broken login items a thing of the past.

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Disclaimer: I am not on the .NET Core Team. I used the tools available publicly and have no insights into the future of .NET Core. It looks very bright though. :)

The working source code for this project can be found here.

Intro

A complete list of post in this series is included below :

In this post, we’re going to look at running the app from the command line and then the Mac.

Running the App in the Windows Command Prompt

While you can obviously run the app inside of Visual Studio with the F5 command. You should also know that you can run the app inside of the console. Before we begin, make sure you have the app found here. After opening the app or downloading it, open the folder containing the project in the command prompt.

You can run your application here by simply typing :

You will the following output :

How To Get Windows On Mac

The exact same result from running the console app in Visual Studio.

Using dotnet publish to get the app ready for Mac

Running Windows Programs On Mac

Go ahead and type dotnet publish on the command prompt and then type tree to look at your directory listing as shown below :

You should see the publish directory. Navigate into it and list out the files in the directory :

Take note that the dlls listed below are related to the package reference that we added in the last blog post.

  • Newtonsoft.Json.dll
  • System.Runtime.Serialization.Primitives.dll

This only leaves the NetCoreConsoleApp.dll which is the Console application that we can run on a Mac (or any other platform that supports .NET Core).

Running the app on a Mac

Finally! It is about time you might say. I agree. Before you can run the app on your Mac, you’re going to need to head back over to the .NET Core downloads page and install OpenSSL and then the SDK (or runtime) if you remember the difference from the first post.

To run this on your Mac, you’ll need to copy the ‘publish’ folder to your Mac. Then open Terminal and you can run the app by just typing :

This is awesome! Now you have an app that run on another platform and you used your existing .NET skillset to create it. I’m LOVING .NET Core!

Wrap-up

How To Close All Running Apps On Macbook Pro

OK, I’m going to take a break and I’ll be back next week. As always, thanks for reading and smash one of those share buttons to give this post some love if you found it helpful. Also, feel free to leave a comment below or follow me on twitter for daily links and tips.