Have you ever stared desperately at the Finder’s smiling face and whispered to yourself in desperation: “I wish I knew how to quit you.” It’s a difficult proposition, to be sure, as the Finder may seem like it is the very incarnation of OS X, but in reality it’s little different from any other app running on your Mac. While there’s no “Quit” command in the application menu by default, a little command-line magick can fix that up for you nice and pretty.
Just fire up a Terminal window and enter the following:
defaults write com.apple.Finder QuitMenuItem 1You’ll have to relaunch the Finder; option-click and hold (or control-option-click, if you prefer) on its icon in the Dock, and you’ll see “Relaunch.” The Finder will quit and restart, but now you’ll have a brand new shiny “Quit Finder” command in the application menu. And remember, like any other app, you can always relaunch the Finder by clicking on its icon in the Dock.
[via Lifehacker]
Good comment, Dan, but I think if you option-click the finder icon, it does little more than hide the windows of your current application. I think you meant Ctrl - Option - Click. No harm done though, I still figured it out. :P
@Wesg: I think Dan means that you option click and hold on the icon as I always do.
But yes, option clicking on any icon hides the previous one.
@wesg: Yep, I did mean option-click and hold, but ctrl-option-click works as well. I've updated the post to be clearer. Thanks.
This was always done via TinkerTool if you hate going to the Terminal to do everything.
I'm sure this will mark me as an ultra-noob, but under what circumstances would you want to quit (as opposed to relaunch) Finder?
@Matt: There's not a lot of reasons, truthfully. But if you need to free up resources, the Finder does use up RAM, so sometimes it can be helpful for it to quit. And on occasion, troubleshooting Finder issues can be easier if it doesn't restart itself every time you try to kill it.