• Posted by Peter Haza
  • On September 11, 2008

  • Filed under Anything else

  • 20 Comments

Cmd + Tab and Dock not working in OS X

Today suddenly my Cmd + Tab just died on me, along with the Dock. Seeing as I use ⌘⇥ all the time, I set out for a solution. Being quite early in the morning, I didn’t really think for myself but figured Google could do the job.

Well, Google did as I told and led me to this thread. People were talking about deleting files on the command line, sorting permission and even re-installing the Dock.

Too much work for me, so I turned to IRC, knowing morning here meant evening somewhere else.

ph^: Is there anything similar to explorer in windows that you can kill in os x to make the dock and ⌘⇥ work again?

Infininight: yeah…

Infininight: it’s called the “Dock” ;)

And so I fired up Activity Monitor and force killed Dock. Two seconds later my Dock popped up and ⌘ ⇥ worked again.

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20 comments

  1. Posted by Patrick 11th September, 2008 at 10:26 pm |

    Was that a Mac specific IRC channel and if so could you please tell me the server and channel name?

    Thanks in advance

  2. Posted by Peter Haza 11th September, 2008 at 10:32 pm |

    No, it’s actually a channel for TextMate, but all the clever people are hanging in there anyway. That would be ##textmate on irc.freenode.net.

  3. Posted by Patrick 12th September, 2008 at 09:24 am |

    Thank you very much.

  4. Posted by Corgi 13th October, 2008 at 01:36 am |

    I think I love you. Thanks.

  5. Posted by Pagaille 15th November, 2008 at 02:50 pm |

    I was so happy to find this trick… However it didn’t worked for me :-( I still have to reboot my machine in order for this to work again…

  6. Posted by Pagaille 15th November, 2008 at 02:53 pm |

    Thinking twice, I remembered that I had been watching tv throught eyeTV, which had been started through Front Row (using a google labs python script)… I discovered that simply stopping eyeTV wasn’t enough : you also have to quit Front Row. Thanks !! :-)

  7. Posted by Aaron Harp 21st May, 2009 at 02:47 am |

    thank you, thank you.

  8. Posted by Kiki 29th May, 2009 at 04:00 pm |

    Gah, I even figured this out myself first time it happened to me… thanks.

  9. Posted by Fred Raputznik 1st June, 2009 at 06:05 pm |

    Thanks for the tip! I always forget about Activity Monitor; I was looking to restart Dock via the Force Quit dialog! Thanks!

  10. Posted by Bill 7th August, 2009 at 06:39 pm |

    Huzzah!!!

    Just what I was looking for and found it at the top of the Google results for "cmd-tab" AND "not working". Short. Simple. I all problems were so easily solved.

    Thanks.

  11. Posted by Theodric 10th September, 2009 at 01:14 pm |

    Nice one. For me, only cmd-tab and cmd-space (Spotlight) had quit working: I fired up Activity Monitor and discovered that the screensaver dæmon had hung. Killed that, and all was back as normal. But you pointed me in the right direction!

  12. Posted by jerry 9th October, 2009 at 11:05 am |

    Same-same here. Screensaver daemon hung, no Cmd-Tab. Wonder what that is…
    But anyway, thanks for the tip, Peter!

  13. Posted by nobody 16th October, 2009 at 03:17 pm |

    Thanks! I did think to open the Activity Manager, but I thought the Finder was the problem, not the Dock.

  14. Posted by Niels 5th December, 2009 at 07:18 am |

    Worked. Weird problem….

  15. Posted by Musthafa 8th December, 2009 at 05:02 pm |

    Thanks a lot !!!, You saved my day :)

  16. Posted by Bob Kauflin 18th December, 2009 at 10:10 pm |

    I had the same problem. Turned out I was running a screensaver called PolarClock. I swtiched to another screensaver and it solved the problem.

  17. Posted by urchinpriests 8th January, 2010 at 02:08 pm |

    Nice to see the topic Google result (yours) is now a simple fix. Thanks for posting… worked great!

  18. Posted by Jeroen 19th January, 2010 at 07:18 pm |

    In my case it was also Frontrow, eating up all my cpu as well by the way.. Thanks a bundle..

  19. Posted by Carlos 30th January, 2010 at 07:17 pm |

    This never happened before, but now it did, and your solution helped me out. Thanks!

  20. Posted by Shaun 2nd February, 2010 at 04:14 am |

    This worked for me from the command line:

    killall -HUP Dock

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