Windows – How to quickly close many Windows/Programs

windowwindows 10

My workflow includes many open windows. Sometimes I want to clean up and close around 10 of them (but not all). How can I achieve this fast and simple on Windows?

Edit:
"but not all" to me means "selectively", not grouped by program or name, and not always the same. During research phase, I usually have opened some diff tools, some console windows, some svn logs, some explorer windows and some plain text editors. I permanently have and keep opened a mail program, an IDE, the spreadsheet where I record my time spent and a browser. Opening huge projects in the IDE takes time, so I don't want to a killall or log-off-log-on procedure.

Best Answer

The fastest native solution seems to be Win + Tab and then middle-click the Apps to close them.

The best 3rd party solution I found is 7+ Taskbar Tweaker. You can configure it to close Tasks by middle-click to the tasks entry immediately in the task bar. Unfortunately, Taskbar Tweaker seems to be tailor-fit very closely to Windows and broke with every major update (Anniversary, Creator). The maintainer each time fixed it within some weeks, but meanwhile everything defaults to the old behavior of opening new instances instead of closing old ones.

Related Solutions

Windows – How to close windows by their handle

Okay, I made a small app that does the trick.

Screenshot

You can download it here.

Usage:

Start the program
Hold your mouse over the window you want to close (don't click on it)
Press delete.

It sends a wm_close to the window under the mouse cursor.

Delphi code below...

unit uCloseWindow;

interface

uses
  Windows, Forms, Messages, SysUtils, Variants, Classes, Controls;

type
  TfrmMain = class(TForm)
    procedure FormKeyDown(Sender: TObject; var Key: Word; Shift: TShiftState);
  public
  end;

var
  frmMain: TfrmMain;

implementation

{$R *.dfm}

procedure TfrmMain.FormKeyDown(Sender: TObject; var Key: Word;
  Shift: TShiftState);
var
  HandleUnderCursor:HWND;
begin
  if Key=VK_DELETE then
  begin
    HandleUnderCursor := WindowFromPoint(Mouse.CursorPos);
    SendMessage(HandleUnderCursor,WM_CLOSE,0,0)
  end;
end;

end.

How to make per-window keyboard layouts with plain XMonad

Install kbdd daemon which does the job.

Run this at startup:

kbdd
setxkbmap "us,ua" -option grp:scroll_toggle

That's all!

To display your layout in a widget you can find this Ruby code useful:

  interface = 'ru.gentoo.KbddService'
  member = 'layoutChanged'
  mon = open "| dbus-monitor --monitor \"sender='#{interface}',member='#{member}'\""
  loop do
    str = mon.gets
    if str =~ /layoutChanged/
      lang = mon.gets[/.\Z/] # lang is now either 0 or 1 depending on the current layout
    end
  end

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Windows – How to close windows by their handle

How to make per-window keyboard layouts with plain XMonad

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