Jan 30
Tonight I realized something, it caught me off guard for a second. Generally to quit a program I will hit command-q to quit the program. Tonight I wanted to close a Finder window so I hit command-q and to my surprise this actually killed the entire Finder process and not only the front most Finder window.
Now that I think about this it is the proper behavior but I would think that with something as critical as Finder they would make that command only close the front most window. I noticed that everything was gone, even the icons on my desktop. I guess this is a quicker way than dropping to terminal to sudo killall Finder.
January 30th, 2008 at 11:28 am
Is this a one-off incident? I’m not on my mac now so I can’t test. Can you re-produce that “kill”?
January 30th, 2008 at 11:32 am
Maybe just by chance. I can’t reproduce. Only command-w works to close the window.
January 30th, 2008 at 11:36 am
same deal. cmd+q is non-funct on finder lvl
January 30th, 2008 at 11:57 am
cmd-q doesn’t do anything on my Mac and it shouldn’t do anything by default on any other Mac. This shouldn’t be a “tip”.
January 30th, 2008 at 12:33 pm
It does kill Finder on my iMac with Leopard. But not every time… if another application is running and I do cmd – Q with finder window: Finder + icons on desktop go away (freaked me out the 1st time!). If only Finder is “opened”, then cmd-Q does almost nothing (seems to quit for half a second then reappears)
January 30th, 2008 at 1:12 pm
I think that could be because you could have used some of the utilities to enable the quit function in finder….just my thought on it..but if cant be reproduced….seems to be a bug
January 30th, 2008 at 7:24 pm
shan is correct. By default, the Finder does not provide the use the option to quit, neither through an item in the File menu nor the standard cmd-Q keyboard equivalent. The only option for a Finder in a default configuration to be terminated is to “Force quit” (a.k.a “kill”) through Activity Monitor, the terminal, or through the force quit dialog (cmd-opt-Esc).
However, there are several system modification tools (e.g. TinkerTool) that will enable the Quit menu item and keyboard shortcut through a hidden preference setting.
It is important to note that quitting the finder in through the enabled option is NOT the same as killing it. When you kill a process, in general the application does not have the opportunity to clean up after itself (such as closing files and flushing buffers), and thus your system can be left in an indeterminate state. When you enable the Finder’s Quit command, you are providing yourself a mechanism to end the Finder’s current process but still allow it to terminate normally and perform any needed cleanup.
This is actually a very useful ability, as, like almost all other software, the Finder does contain bugs that occasionally manifest themselves. For example, On my PowerMac G5, I occasionally have issues between permissions on my Desktop and mounted Windows Shares, manifested when I try to drag a file from a Windows share to the desktop, and instead of getting the green circle “+” cursor, I get the slashed circle “no” cursor. In those instances, it is useful to be able to instruct the Finder to quit and then just to click on the Finder icon on my dock to relaunch it. Correct interpretation of file permissions between the two volumes is then restored.
January 31st, 2008 at 8:55 pm
That does not happen on my Macs.
Certainly not a tip yet. You my want to correct that.
February 3rd, 2008 at 4:27 am
Yeah. Finder has no quit option by default and you shouldn’t be able to quit by pushing command+q. You have to enable the quit menu item yourself, which most people would not want to do.
February 10th, 2008 at 9:07 pm
is this cmd-q thing only in Leopard, maybe? or was that just a one-time glitch? “Quitting the finder” is quite shocking becaue you realize that the Finder is simply, albeit a highly indispensible one, an program OR application!
February 12th, 2008 at 7:01 am
Hasnt worked for a while now; none that I could do in 10.5.x. Used this once upon a time to quit Finder totally to give everything to rendering in FCP.
Now I can only BRIEFLY quit using Activity Monitor, and even then the Finder comes back instantly. No RAM or CPU savings doing that anymore…
April 13th, 2008 at 11:07 pm
you must have used a twiking tool to make quit finder apper
May 25th, 2008 at 11:36 am
use activity monitor in utilities if you want to quit the finder
June 26th, 2008 at 2:12 pm
In Leopard, try pressing Option while clicking and holding the Finder’s dock icon.
What’s the last menu item you see?
September 11th, 2008 at 5:16 pm
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October 10th, 2009 at 5:07 am
I just did the same thing by accident. What I want to know is how I relaunch it??? I shut the computer down then restarted it and still the finder won’t open. WHen I click on it it says “the application finder can’t be opened”
November 22nd, 2009 at 7:27 am
I am not sure why it did that, i got an error to though, Finder was acting up so I force quit it and now when i try to start it up I get
” The application Finder can’t be open -10810″
January 4th, 2010 at 8:30 pm
The solution to this problem has been posted on this blog:
http://utvv.blogspot.com/2010/01/how-to-fix-application-finder-cant-be.html
Hope this helps!
January 8th, 2010 at 4:52 pm
Everyone, it was no accident. Somehow a feature of your operating system got activated that added the quit option to the Finder menu. This can be turned on and off again using Terminal. Try it for yourself.
To turn the Quit menu on:
In Terminal type:
defaults write com.apple.finder QuitMenuItem -bool YES
Hit Return.
Then type:
killall Finder
Hit Return.
To turn this quit menu off do the same as before just change “YES” to “NO” and then repeat killall Finder.
March 17th, 2010 at 9:37 am
command W to close any window