Captain Kill Switch

Close all your open apps in one click

65 followers

Close all your open apps in one click

65 followers

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App switcher

A quiet menu-bar button that closes every running app the moment you need a clean slate. Free, private, and cross-platform for macOS, Windows, and Linux.

Free

Launch tags:Windows•Productivity•GitHub

Launch Team

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Captain Kill Switch

Maker

📌

Hi Product Hunt 👋 I built this because of a specific, stupid moment that kept repeating: finishing for the day with thirty-odd windows open, and closing them one at a time like I was tidying a room by picking up individual grains of rice. Captain Kill Switch is one button in your menu bar. Click it, or hit a hotkey, and every running application closes. System processes are left alone. That is the whole product — there's no dashboard, no settings to tune, no account to make. A few things I decided deliberately: - It's free, and there's no signup. Nothing to churn out of. - It runs entirely locally. Anonymous stats and crash reports only — never your app list, never your files. - It really does close everything. Anything still open a couple of seconds later gets force-closed, unsaved work included. Save first. That bluntness is the feature, and I'd rather say it here than have you discover it. - It's genuinely cross-platform — macOS, Windows, Linux — plus a cks CLI through winget, Scoop, and Homebrew. What I'd most like to hear: what do you actually want spared? Some people want their music left running, some want their terminal untouched. That's the next thing I build, and I'd rather build the version you'd use.

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2mo ago

This is nice. I appreciate the straightforward concept and simple setup process. It does kill all of the apps, but it takes more than one click on windows. You have to press the red button then press "kill all apps". Could this process be shortened to just press the red button?

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1mo ago

Captain Kill Switch

Maker

Thanks @courtneyhunter_1 ! The second click's there on purpose — killing every app at once means we didn't want a stray click nuking someone's unsaved work. But fair point on the friction — we're looking at a right-click menu on the button with an "enable one-click kill" toggle, so you can opt into instant-kill mode while it stays safe by default for everyone else. Thoughts?

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1mo ago

Forum Threads

p/captain-kill-switch

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1mo ago

80 people upvoted this and I have no idea which of you would miss it if it vanished.

Which of these is you?

Pre screen-share / demo panic: thirty windows, notifications armed, everyone waiting
End of the day: shut everything so tomorrow starts clean
Before gaming or a recording: free the machine
Focus reset: close the tabs I've been "coming back to" for a week
None. I upvoted because it looked neat and I won't use it

And the one I really want: if you looked and did NOT install, what stopped you? Closed source, telemetry, "I can just Cmd-Q", two clicks instead of one, no Spotify exception, SmartScreen warning, something else. Say it plainly. I would rather build the version you'd actually keep than defend this one.

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