How to Control+Alt+Delete on a Mac and Force Quit apps

1. Press ⌘+Option+Esc and you'll bring up the Force Quit dialog box. This can be used at any time but, given that you can quit any app by making it active and pressing ⌘+Q, the only time you'll need it is when an app stops responding or starts beachballing. The command would still works when the app is in full-screen mode.
2. Once you've called up the dialog box, you'll see a list of currently running apps. Usually the one that's causing a problem will be labelled as not responding.
3. Select the non-responding app and press Force Quit.

   

If you don't want to memorize the shortcut, there's an easy way to perform the same action via the Apple menu: Click on the Apple logo in the upper left corner > Force Quit > select the app and force quit (the equivalent of ctrl alt del on Mac).

Tip: If apps regularly become unresponsive or start hogging processor cycles, iStat Menus can help get to the bottom of what's causing the problem. It will show you which apps are using the biggest CPU cycles. And if you need more information, you can launch Activity Monitor directly from the iStat Menus app.

All other alternatives for Ctrl+Alt+Del on a Mac

How to perform "Ctrl-Alt-Delete" on Mac?

There are a couple of other force quit shortcuts to unfreeze app on Mac:

1. Dock. If you hold down the Control and Option keys, and click on an app's icon in the Dock, you'll see Force Quit listed as an option in the menu that pops up. Select it and the app should force quit.
   
2. Activity Monitor. You can double-click on any application in the Activity Monitor to bring up a separate window with more information about it and the Quit option to close it.
   
3. Apple Menu. The third way to do the equivalent of control alt delete on a Mac keyboard is to click on the Apple menu and select Force Quit. This will bring up the Force Quit dialog box and you can select the unresponsive app from there.
    
4. Terminal. If the basic methods don't work, you can access Terminal utility in the Applications and type the force quit command:
   1. Type "top" and press the Return button. You'll see the information about all the apps that are active at the moment.
   2. In the Command column, find the name of the app you want to terminate and make a note of its PID number (right on the left).
   3. Type "q" to return to the command line.
   4. Type "kill111" (replacing 111 with the PID number) — this will perform force quit on Mac for the selected program. 
   5. Quit Terminal.

Once you learn how to force quit an app on Mac, here are two quick ways to relaunch it: 

1.  Click on the app icon if it's in the Dock. 
2. Click on the magnifying glass in the top right corner, type the name of the app, and click on it once it appears.

What do you do when application won't Force Quit

Sometimes it's not just one app that's unresponsive. What to do when your Mac freezes? How do you start Task Manager on a Mac?

To fix browser freezing — let's say, if you can't quit Safari — it would be enough to go into Activity Monitor and kill Safari processes. But if the whole system is not responding and force quit doesn't work on Mac, you'll have to give it a fresh start.

Unlike Windows macOS doesn't use the typical Ctrl-Alt-Delete shortcut to choose frozen programs to Force Quit. If you have a frozen Mac that won't do anything and you can't use any of the methods above to force quit (tip: you can force quit the Finder if it's misbehaving — it's just an app), you need to force it to restart.

This is not the most time-efficient option, but it's definitely helpful to know how to close all apps on Mac.

How to check performance with Activity Monitor

If your Mac is running slowly, but all your apps are still working, or if the fans seem to run more often than normal or are louder than usual, there may be a process hogging CPU cycles. Seems it is a good time to peek inside the processes running on your computer. You can use Mac Activity Monitor shortcut to discover the culprit.