GENIUS TIPS
Howard Oakley solves Mac and iOS issues
If I leave the latest version of Pages Q running without open windows, the moment I switch to another app, it quits. Why, and how can I stop it? This is a behaviour which you may A have already noticed in bundled apps like TextEdit and Preview, and is set by the developer with a flag named N SS up ports Automatic Termination in the Info.plist file inside the app’s bundle. You can’t change that directly, as that breaks the app’s signature, which is used as a security measure.
You can alter this behaviour using the ‘defaults’ command in Terminal. Type in: defaults write -app Pages NSDisable Automatic Termination -bool TRUE Or, you can stop all apps from quitting automatically in this manner with: defaults write-gNS Disable Automatic Termination -bool TRUE
If either of those causes problems, simply repeat the Terminal command, replacing TRUE at the end with FALSE.
What’s even stranger about this behaviour is that, although these apps remove themselves from the Dock and app switcher, if you open Activity Monitor or the Force Quit dialog, you’ll see that they don’t actually quit for some time afterwards, possibly even hours.
During that period, if you double-click one of your documents, the hidden app springs back into life to open it. After a while, though, macOS silently closes the app, and if it’s to run again it will have to be loaded up afresh.