Automatically quits apps you are no longer using.
Lives in the menu bar, stays out of your way.
MagicQuit keeps your Mac tidy without you noticing it. Two mechanisms, both optional per app:
- Idle quit — apps you haven't used for a while (default: 8 hours) are quit automatically. One setting, fixed steps from 15 minutes to 48 hours.
- Quit on last window close — when you close an app's last window, the app quits, like on Windows. Close the last Preview window, Preview is gone.
Everything is exclude-based: both features apply to all regular apps, and you maintain a short list of exceptions. Media players (Music, Spotify, Podcasts, VLC) are excluded from window-close quitting by default so your audio keeps playing.
Download the latest release from the Releases page, unzip, and drag MagicQuit.app into /Applications.
Requires macOS 14 or later.
- Click the menu bar icon to see all running apps with their remaining time.
- The checkbox next to each app enables/disables idle quitting for it — unchecked apps are never touched.
- The ↩ button resets an app's timer.
- Settings: idle duration, launch at login, quit-on-last-window-close with its exclusion list.
The window-close feature uses the Accessibility API to count an app's windows (it is the only reliable way to also see minimized windows). macOS will ask you to grant access in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility the first time you enable the feature. The idle-quit feature needs no permissions.
MagicQuit always quits apps politely (the equivalent of ⌘Q). Apps with unsaved changes will ask you to save instead of losing data; MagicQuit never force-kills anything.
Open MagicQuit.xcodeproj in Xcode 16 or later and build the MagicQuit scheme. Unit tests: xcodebuild test -scheme MagicQuit.