Apps Which Were Quit Remain in The KM Application Switcher

Applications which I launched and then quit, show up and remain visible in the Application Switcher from that point on. Also things that I didn't explicitly start like "com.apple.WebKit". They are faded out and always at the end of the list, but I'd still prefer to only see the currently running applications.
I think I enabled this accidentally somehow, but can't see where I can disable it. Help?

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Aaaand I found it, pressing “j” while it is active does this.
Undocumented feature AFAICS (-:

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The “J” is omitted from the documentation,

  • Press “j” to show (or hide) “recently quit” applications.

but you can click and hold on an icon and the menu appears with all the options and the key codes.

Aha! That works. For some reason I only tried right-clicking to find a menu.

Interestingly, I have something similar happening to me, but in this case, it’s just one program: MacUpdate Desktop. Here are the steps:

  1. Open MacUpdate Desktop.
  2. Use Application Switcher & see MacUpdate Desktop (which is expected).
  3. Quit MacUpdate Desktop.
  4. Use Application Switcher & still see MacUpdate Desktop, even though it is no longer running. However, if I select it in the Application Switcher, it then disappears, even though there is nothing to actually switch to (the current app remains the one in front).

This has been going on for months & months. It’s a minor annoyance, but an annoyance nonetheless.

That’s because MacUpdate Desktop does something nasty and uncommon (thank god).

Whenever you quit the app, either through menu, dock or keyboard shortcut(CMD+Q), the app disappears from windows, dock or CMD+TAB switcher, but the process actually keeps running FOREVER.
This behaviour doesn’t alter wether you enable the menu bar item or not, but if you do, you can really kill the process by right click the menu bar item and then click quit there.

Since it’s not another daemon process but the main process that stays alive when explicitly being asked to quit, Keyboard Maestro doesn’t recognise it as quit.

I just made a ugly hacky workaround macro for it, and I’d really want to not need that macro.

If it’s at all possible, please investigate and provide a way for us to deal with MacUpdate Desktop…

It sounds like Keyboard Maestro does work with MacUpdate Desktop - Keyboard Maestro asks it to quit and MacUpdate Desktop does whatever it feels like.

If you want to force quit MacUpdate Desktop, you an do that instead, Keyboard Maestro has several ways to force quit applications.

If you want MacUpdate Desktop to behave differently when asked to quit (like actually quit), then that would be something to take up with MacUpdate.

MacUpdate Desktop is designed to run as a daemon or menu-bar-app when the full GUI is closed. See this post.

-ccs

I understand your point, it is by no means your responsibility to bend over backwards to support an app that acts, as ccstone said, high-handed.

I'm just really frustrated that there is no way to define MacUpdate's state of "app windows and dock icon disappear but process stays on", so that whatever trigger I use feels super hacky and may have unintended results.