Hold Please

⌘Q only quits when you hold it.

A quick ⌘Q does nothing at all — the key never reaches the app, so there's no menu flash and no quit. Keep it held for 0.6 seconds and the app in front quits the normal, polite way: anything with unsaved work still gets to put its sheet up. A small bar shows what's about to quit while you hold.

Left alone on purpose:

• ⌥⌘Q and ⇧⌘Q, so there's still an instant quit when you want one.
• Finder, which has no Quit item.
• Password fields. macOS hides keystrokes from every app while secure input is on, so ⌘Q there quits the old way.

Install

Download the zip from Releases, unzip it, drag Hold Please to Applications and open it. It adds itself to Login Items, then asks for Accessibility permission — an event tap is how a key gets caught and swallowed. Allow it in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility, and it starts watching within a couple of seconds, no relaunch needed.

Or build it yourself (you'll need Xcode or the Command Line Tools). build.sh installs it to /Applications and opens it:

git clone https://github.com/AdamMackey/hold-please.git
cd hold-please
./build.sh

There's no Dock icon and no menu bar icon. Open the app again to reach Quit.

./build.sh uninstall     # quit it, drop the login item, delete the app

Settings

defaults write com.adammackey.holdplease holdSeconds -float 1.0
defaults write com.adammackey.holdplease excludedBundleIDs -array com.some.app

holdSeconds is clamped to 0.2–3 seconds. Apps in excludedBundleIDs keep plain ⌘Q — useful for a VM or a remote desktop that wants the key itself. Both are read on each press, but a running copy caches defaults for a few seconds, so give it a moment or restart it.

Why an event tap

Rebinding Quit in System Settings → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts can take ⌘Q away, but it matches menu items by exact title ("Quit Safari", "Quit Mail"), so it's one entry per app and it can't tell a tap from a hold. A session-level CGEventTap sees the key on its way to the app in front, so it can swallow the tap and let the hold through — for every app at once, without touching a single system binding.

Support

Hold Please is free. If it saves you one unsaved draft, you can buy me a coffee.

More from MackEye Apps

Hold Please is one of the small apps from MackEye Apps: Mac utilities like Desktop Please and Simple Battery, and tools for Claude like Meterous and Pulseous. See them all at mackeye.app.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.