closeAll: force-quit every Dock app from one menu-bar button on Mac

What is closeAll?

closeAll is a small open-source macOS menu-bar app with one job: close every normal app that is running, in one go. Its icon in the menu bar is a small stack of windows. Click it, review the list, then press Force Quit. The checked apps are closed with Force Quit.

Read this once before you use it: Force Quit does not ask an app to save. Unsaved work in the apps you close is lost.

How you use it

1. Click the stack-of-windows icon at the top of the screen. 2. Leave a check on every app that should close. Remove the check to keep an app open; closeAll remembers that choice. 3. Under Background apps, check any menu-bar app that should close too. 4. Press Force Quit.

Each row shows the app's own icon, so you can recognize it before it closes. Close or uncheck anything that has unsaved work first.

What closes

• Every normal application, the kind you would otherwise right-click in the Dock and quit. Editors, browsers and chat apps are included, so uncheck any you want to keep.
• Background apps you check. The Background apps section lists menu-bar apps that you installed in /Applications or ~/Applications, such as a clipboard manager or a VPN client. They start unchecked, so nothing there closes unless you check it.

closeAll verifies that each app really exited. If an app survives Force Quit or comes straight back, it sends a hard kill (SIGKILL), up to three times. Any app it still could not close is named in red.

What stays open

• Finder, so the desktop stays up, and closeAll itself, so the button is still there.
• The Dock, Control Center, WindowServer and the other processes that keep your login session alive.
• Any app you uncheck, and background apps you did not check.
• Apple's own menu-bar agents, helpers packed inside another app, updaters kept in Library folders, and processes with no window or menu are not listed at all. They usually close together with their parent app.

Privacy and permissions

closeAll is not sandboxed, because the App Sandbox would block it from quitting other applications. According to the README it does not use the network and does not collect analytics. Your keep-list is stored only in your local preferences.

Install

closeAll needs macOS 14 or later. The app that make app builds on an Apple silicon Mac is an Apple silicon app. Clone the repository from GitHub, run make app, and open build/closeAll.app. Copy it to /Applications if you want to keep it installed. It shows no Dock icon.

The build is signed ad hoc so it can launch on your Mac, and it is not notarized. If macOS blocks the first launch, Control-click closeAll.app, choose Open and confirm. To open it at login, add it under General in System Settings, then Login Items. To quit it, open the panel and choose Quit closeAll.

Check the plan without closing anything

swift run closeAll -- --dry-run prints the quit plan as JSON and exits without closing any app. make check runs the unit tests and then prints the live plan, and it fails if that plan includes Finder, closeAll itself or another session process.

Open source

closeAll is released under the MIT license. The quit rules live in a separate core module with no AppKit, covered by unit tests, and the menu-bar app is built on top of it. The repository also has an Arabic README.

Emad Alhamou, the author of this site, publishes closeAll on GitHub. Contribution guidelines, a code of conduct and a security policy are in the repository.