How do you see all programs that are running on a Mac laptop?

All active programs (except those that run as a background process) are highlighted in the Dock. Pressing the Command (cmd) and Tab keys will show the application switcher with all the active applications. In the Utilities folder (within the Applications folder) the Activity Monitor can be found. This will detail all running processes.

To see all of the "applications" running, you can press ctrl-command-esc to pull up the force quit dialogue. There you can see all of the applications that are running.

If you want to see all of the individual background processes, etc. Open a terminal window (in Applications -> Utilities) and type

PS

and press enter. There are some more options to see different information about the processes running. Typing

man PS

in the terminal window should give you some more options to use with the PS utility.