When running a program or test in SBT, if you want to exit from it (and not from SBT) try adding following lines in your build.sbt file: fork := true To directly add forking in an SBT session, type set fork := true This will not detach and open a new consule from the original sbt console. But, users can kill this separately. The way to do this in Max OS or Windows is to search a Java process with command line having sbt-launch in Activity Monitor / Windows Task Manager, and end it. In Unix, try grepping a process with sbt-launch in a new terminal, and kill it. Command to do that is: kill -9 `ps -h | grep java | grep -v sbt-launch | grep -v grep | awk '{print $1}'` By default, the run or test tasks run in the JVM as sbt. Forking can be used to run these tasks in a child process. By default, a forked process uses the same Java and Scala versions being used for the build and the working directory and JVM options of the current process. SBT documentation page discusse