How can I quickly close many Windows/Programs?

Solution 1:

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.

Solution 2:

In my case, I simply open the task manager, then in the tab Application, I select the Apps to close, then I click the End task button.

Solution 3:

If they are windows of the same app, you can also right-click the entry in the task bar and select "close all windows".

Solution 4:

If it is a known group of applications that you want to close each time you could use something like AutoHotKey to create a shortcut that closes just those windows.

Use the Window Spy (included with AHK) to most easily get the details you'd need about the windows and then use IfWinExist and WinClose commands.