Recently, I was working on my MacBook Pro, and I noticed that the familiar Cmd-Tab wasn’t swapping window/applications as I’d expected. At first I just worked around this, using my touchpad and the four fingers sideways gesture, but then I really started to find this frustrating so I decided might as well restart my computer. In retrospect, I probably should have checked the Finder and/or restarted that first.
So, I did a restart, and then closed all my applications, but the system didn’t appear to be shutting down. The dock was still active, and I could still open applications. I decided it was time to use Apple’s “Force Quit” (Opt-Cmd-Esc), but it didn’t work. After checking my key combination again, I realized the only application running was the dock, so there was nothing to quit.
I started terminal, and after a bit of hunting online, I discovered how to “start” the Finder.
open /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app &
The finder started up, and to my contentment, all my functionality was restored. I suppose I should have just tried restarting the Finder in the first place. From experience, this is usually a good remedy when my Mac is behaving badly.
In any case, I thought I would share this little tidbit as looking online all I saw was notes on how to “restart” the finder, along with a kill -NOHUP command that seems to be fairly well misunderstood by the people writing about it.
So, yes, if you kill the Finder process, launchd will automatically restart it. But in my case, it wasn’t running in the first place, so that wasn’t much help.
I also found someone who had posted on a board somewhere to run open /Applications/Finder.app. Yes, Apple users can be just as clueless and misinformed as Windows users, so for those who might encounter this same silly need to start the Finder manually via the terminal, I hope this is useful.
