CLI Apps Quit

`ed apps quit`

Asks Edith to quit an app. Names one app, or passes --all to quit everything except Finder and Edith.

ed apps quit <app> [--force] [--json]
ed apps quit --all [--yes] [--force] [--json]

Arguments

Name	Type / values	Default	What it does
`<app>`	string, optional	none	App name, bundle id, or an unambiguous prefix of a name. Required unless `--all` is given, and refused when it is.

Options

Name	Type / values	Default	What it does
`--all`	flag	off	Quit everything except Finder, Edith and Edith's menu bar helper. Cannot be combined with an app name.
`--force`	flag	off	Use `forceTerminate` instead of `terminate`, which kills the app outright rather than letting it save first. Applies to both forms.
`--yes`	flag	off	Actually quit. Required with `--all`; without it the command counts the targets and touches nothing. Accepted and ignored for a single app.
`--json`	flag	off	Emit JSON on stdout instead of the human line.
`--help`, `-h`	flag	off	Print the help for this command on stdout and exit 0.
`--version`	flag	off	Print the CLI version on stdout and exit 0.

The checks run in a fixed order, and the order is worth knowing because it decides which failure you see first.

Naming nothing at all is a failure rather than a no-op, and so is naming both:

$ ed apps quit
error: say which app to quit
hint: pass a name, or --all

$ ed apps quit --all Safari
error: --all quits everything, so it takes no app name

Both of those exit 1, not 2. They are checked inside the command rather than by the argument parser, which only sees a valid command line in each case: an optional positional that is absent, and an optional positional that is present.

Next comes the app check, before anything is resolved or counted. With Edith closed every form of this command exits 4 with the same message, including the --all dry run that would not have quit anything:

error: quitting apps needs the Edith menu bar app to be running
hint: start Edith, then retry

Only then is the app name resolved, or the --all list counted.

Resolution tries three things in order and stops at the first that works: an exact match on the localized name, an exact match on the bundle id, then a unique prefix of a name. All three are case-insensitive, and only the last is a prefix match, so a partial bundle id matches nothing. A prefix that matches several apps fails with the list rather than guessing, and a name that matches none says how to find the right one:

$ ed apps quit nosuchapp
error: no running app called nosuchapp
hint: run `ed apps ls` to see them

Both of those exit 3. Only apps ed apps ls shows are candidates, so a menu bar only app cannot be named here at all.

--all counts its targets and, without --yes, reports the count and stops:

$ ed apps quit --all
would quit 6 app(s)
nothing was quit; pass --yes to go ahead

The count is the listed apps minus Finder, minus Edith, minus Edith's menu bar helper, which is not in the list to begin with. The first line is stdout and the second is stderr, so ed apps quit --all | wc -l sees one line. With --yes the request goes out, and the wording changes to the past tense of asking rather than of quitting:

$ ed apps quit --all --yes
asked Edith to quit 6 app(s)

A single app reads the same way:

$ ed apps quit Spotify
asked Edith to quit Spotify

`--json` shape

Three shapes, one per form. --all without --yes reports what it counted and that it did nothing:

{
  "apps": 6,
  "quit": false
}

--all --yes is the same object with quit flipped:

{
  "apps": 6,
  "quit": true
}

Quitting one app emits that app's row, the same four keys ed apps ls uses, describing the app as it was at the moment the request was sent:

{
  "active": false,
  "bundleID": "com.spotify.client",
  "name": "Spotify",
  "pid": 18719
}

apps is the count of targets, not of apps that quit, and quit says whether the request was sent rather than whether anything closed. Neither form waits for an answer, so neither can tell you more than that. With --json the stderr note about --yes is not printed: the document is the whole output.

Examples

ed apps quit Spotify
ed apps quit com.spotify.client --force
ed apps quit --all
ed apps quit --all --yes --json

Behaviour notes

This mutates nothing that ed owns. It writes no file and changes no setting. What it does is post one com.pulkit.edith.requestQuitApps distributed notification carrying either all and force, or pid and force, and then return. The menu bar helper observes that name and calls terminate() or forceTerminate() on the matching applications.

It is fire and forget. ed does not wait for a reply, does not learn whether the app closed, and exits 0 as soon as the notification is posted. An app with unsaved changes puts up a save dialog and stays open; ed has already exited 0 by then. If you need to know, list again and look:

ed apps quit Spotify
sleep 2
ed apps ls --json | jq -r '.[].name'

The helper refuses to quit com.apple.finder, com.pulkit.edith and com.pulkit.edith.statusbar whatever it is asked, and it recomputes the --all list itself at the moment it acts rather than trusting the count ed sent. That guard is the last word, not the first: ed apps quit Finder resolves cleanly, posts the request, prints asked Edith to quit Finder and exits 0, and then nothing happens. The same is true of ed apps quit Edith. Success here means the request was sent, and a protected app is the one case where a sent request is guaranteed to be dropped.

--force maps to forceTerminate, which is the hard kill: no save prompt, no chance to flush anything to disk. --yes is only consulted on the --all path, so ed apps quit Spotify --yes is accepted and the flag does nothing.