How To Disable Command+Q On a Mac

If you find sometimes you accidentally press Command+Q and quit an app, here are three ways to deal with it. First, if you have your settings right, you can recover from accidentaly quitting without losing any work or the windows and tabs you have open. You can also disable Command+Q for any one app. There is also a way to override Command+Q with another keyboard shortcut to prevent yourself from using it anywhere.



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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can disable Command Q so you don't accidentally Quit apps.
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So let's say you want to disable Command Q. Command Q is the universal keyboard shortcut for quitting an app. There are various reasons why you may want to prevent yourself from accidentally hitting Command Q. For most users this is not a problem. I've never had an issue where I accidentally hit Command Q. But for some users, maybe they have different typing styles, maybe they're using a different keyboard, a non-US keyboard, and maybe there are apps they are using that have shortcuts that are very close to Command Q and they find they accidentally hit Command Q, Quit an app and then either loose their work or the windows they have opened say in a browser are closed and hard to get back.
First let me show you that you can keep Command Q and still recover from accidentally pressing it. Then let me show you how to remap Command Q on a per app basis if there are just one or two apps where this happens to you you can just prevent it happening in that app. Then I'll show you a way to universally set it so that Command Q doesn't quit apps.
First let's start off here in Safari. Notice that if I were to use Command Q here you could see the window that I had open with two tabs open goes away. But if I launch Safari again it comes right back. Command Q really wasn't that big of a deal if I accidentally used it I could get right back to where I was. The same thing in Pages. I have a document open here. Let me even create a new document and I won't even save it. So the document is still unsaved. If I were to use Command Q here it appears that it closed that first document and lost the document I never saved. But if I relaunch Pages you'll see that everything comes back just the way I had it. The reason this happens is because in System Preferences under General, I've got the checkbox here Close Windows when Quitting An App turned Off. If you have that turned Off then apps will remember the windows that were opened, even unsaved documents, and simply launch them again restores the app. It's almost like a deeper version of Hiding an App. Launching it again will simply restore what's there. If I turn this On look what happens in the same situation. When I Quit Safari and then launch Safari again you could see it doesn't reopen those tabs. However Safari actually has a special function. I could go into History and then reopen the last closed window or reopen all windows from the last session. I can get those back.
In Pages if I were to Quit first it's going to ask me if I want to Save this document since I haven't saved it yet. I'll say No, Delete it. The other document was actually auto saved because most modern apps will auto save a document. So if I were to relaunch Pages here it doesn't open that window again. But if I were to go back to that document it would open it up and I shouldn't lose any changes. So now you see how it might not be that big a deal if you accidentally use Command Q.
So let's say you still want to disable it. As a matter of fact some apps, like Goggle Chrome, actually have Command Q as warn before quitting. So if I use Command Q here it's going to tell me I need to hold Command Q for a longer time before quitting. That's a pretty major app that recognizes that sometimes people accidentally press Command Q. But how to prevent that in Safari. In Safari Command Q is quit and just quickly pressing Command Q will do that. But you can go into System Preferences and modify keyboard shortcuts. A lot of you know that you can add keyboard shortcuts. But you can also modify them. So go into the Keyboard section here, go to Shortcuts, go to App Shortcuts, and we're going to add an app shortcut. Now the Menu Item in Safari for quitting is Quit Safari. You have to match the menu name exactly. So you can't just use quit. It actually has to be Quit space Safari. So I'll type that in. I'm going to set that not to all applications but just Safari. I'm going to change the keyboard shortcut to make it Command Option Q and add. Now when I go back into Safari, if I look in the Safari menu, I could see that Quit Safari is Option Command Q. So using Command Q does nothing. Option Command Q will quit.
So now basically here in System Preferences you could add more apps to this. Each app has to be done individually because it's not just a quit command, it's Quit Safari or Quit Pages. So if you find there's one app or maybe two or three apps where you accidentally do this you could just add a few keyboard shortcuts here, remap them to something like Option Command Q and take care of the problem.
But let's say that you just want to disable Command Q across everything. Well, there's not way to do that since all of the Menu Items are different. They have different names with the name of the app in them. But you can set another keyboard shortcut to Command Q and as long as it's the type of keyboard shortcut that will be looked at first it will override Command Q. For instance, let's go into LaunchPad here. There's a Show LaunchPad shortcut. I'm going to turn that On and I'm going to set it to Command Q. Now I'll go into Safari here and try to use Command Q. So the system is first using the LaunchPad shortcut and never gets to Safari. I hit Esc here and you can see Safari has not been quit. Quit Safari still shows as Command Q but the command never reaches Safari. Now if I want to quit Safari I need to go to Safari, Quit Safari here in the Menu to do it. This happens in every app. The Pages Menu, Quit Pages still shows as Command Q. But if I try to use Command Q it will bring up LaunchPad instead. Pages doesn't quit. I have to do that manually there in the Menu. The same thing for Reminders. Command Q doesn't work. I have to go to the Menu. Even something like Calculator Command Q won't work. I have to go Quit Calculator.
So the idea here is to make it so that Command Q doesn't actually quit the app and maybe give you something that changes your behavior if having LaunchPad show up is kind of annoying. You need to either use Command Q again or the escape key to get out of it. But then hopefully it might break you of the habit of using Command Q at the same time it's preventing you from accidentally using it. You could set this to all sorts of other things. For instance, under Mission Control you've got Show Notifications Center. You can set that to Command Q. Switch to Desktop 1 might be Command Q if you're not using multiple spaces. Under Accessibility you can use one of the things here like say Invert Colors and have you screen Invert Colors every time you use Command Q. You probably don't want to change something that you actually use. For instance, you probably use Command Space for Spotlight. You don't want to set that to Command Q and then train yourself to using Command Q for Spotlight. You want to pick something that you wouldn't normally use at all.
To disable this just turn off Show LaunchPad. One of the things I like about using LaunchPad is that there are only two items here. So using Restore Default is pretty easy. Whereas something with a lot more items if you customize something else using Restore Default means you need to then reset some other things here.
So if you have the problem where you accidentally use Command Q hopefully one of the things I showed you here will help you out. Thanks for watching.Related Subjects: Keyboard Shortcuts (51 videos)
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