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I am searching for a newuser-friendly way to kill non-responsive GUI applications under Unity.

I looked over the shoulder of a new Unity user who tried to use gscan2pdf - and gscan2pdf seems to be really broken - after not much tinkering it consumed much CPU und memory, the PC began trashing and the user needed to immediately kill the gscan2pdf GUI which was full-screen, non-responsive and had the focus.

Ok, I know some ways how to do it:

  • Hit Alt+F2 and type xkill -> select the window
  • Hit Alt+F2 start xterm, use top or pgrep and then kill PID or directly use pkill

Both are ways which are not very intuitive for GUI centric users.

Is there some Unity shortcut to get something like xkill?

Or is the best GUI-way to add a top-like GUI to the Unity-starter? And which one?

maxschlepzig
  • 3,734

5 Answers5

31

You could create a keyboard shortcut for xkill.

  1. Type keyboard in the Unity Dash and click the icon. Select the shortcuts tab.

  2. There, scroll down to the custom shortcuts section and click on the + button

  3. Now name your shortcut something and let the command be xkill and then click ok.

  4. Finally click on the xkill shortcut and press the desired key-combo to assign a shortcut to it and that's it :)
  5. Pressing the keyboard shortcut will activate xkill whenever you need it.

keyboard_shortcuts

keyboard_shortcuts2

Nitin Venkatesh
  • 22,739
6

The best way I find is using terminal window :

goto terminal :

sudo ps -aux | grep "name of application"

note down the process ID

sudo kill -9 "processID"

since, If GUI application becomes unresponsive, for time-being it slows down the X(GUI) and all actions would be slowed down, so any gui action for closing the process will be slow.

Rajesh Pantula
  • 1,697
3

Another thing you can do is to run System Monitor. You can select a process with the mouse and hit the "End Process" button to kill it. This should even work with unresponsive processes but I don't think it is as strong as kill -9. It does have the advantage that it is a totally GUI solution and is very similar to the analogous Activity Monitor in Mac OS X. That's helpful to those of us who move back and forth between Mac and Linux.

shadowITninja
  • 31
1

Script to send SIGTERM to the currently active window based on a similar question.

Community
  • 1
l0b0
  • 9,271
1

Didn't try it by myself, but this small script looks useful. It adds a "Force quit" option to the unity launcher.

José Fernández Ramos
  • 356