It may happen that Finder on your Mac suddenly stops responding. For example, you can no longer open files, the spinning beach ball appears or the window blocks and you can no longer close it. In that case, Finder has crashed and you need to restart it.
Because Finder is essential to macOS, it’s all the more annoying when it crashes. Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to restart Finder without also restarting your Mac.
Restart Finder
The easiest method to restart Finder is via the Dock. Press the ctrl^ + Option⌥key and click the Finder icon in the dock. The context menu will open where you have the option to restart Finder via the ‘Restart’ option.
Restart Finder via the menu
- Click Finder
- Hold down the shift⇧ key
- Click on the icon in the menu bar
- Choose ‘Force Quit from Finder’
- Release the shift⇧ key
Of course, you can also force restart Finder via ▸ ‘Force stop’. Select Finder from the list and click the Restart button. If you cannot reach the option via the menu, you can also use the key combination Cmd⌘ + Option⌥ + ESC to use.
Restart Finder with macOS Terminal
If the above methods do not work, you can always consult Terminal to manually restart Finder. Open Terminal via Applications ▸ Utilities, copy the command below and paste it into an empty window. Press enter to run it and restart Finder.
$killall Finder
Restart Mac
The above solutions should be enough to restart Finder when it becomes unresponsive. In most cases you can then use it again. If this is not the case, restarting your Mac is often the only solution.