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When you work on your Mac for a long time, you may have many applications open and it can become difficult to close each one individually. Here’s how to close all open apps at once.
You can shut down your Mac to close all of your apps, but if you’re switching from one main task to another, you don’t need to restart your Mac as frequently.
You can use the free Bunch app to write a list of all the apps you want to close and open with a single click. Or if you don’t want to download a third party app just for this purpose, you can still quit apps using Apple’s App Switcher.
To quickly switch between apps on your Mac, you can hold down the Command key and repeatedly click a single Tab key. Each time you press Tab, you can cycle through a list of apps, but you can also tap the Q key when any of them are highlighted.
This will terminate the app, so it can be a quick enough way to clear floors. But it still requires multiple clicks.
So if you like to do this often, the shortcut is the easiest way to close all your apps at once. Here’s how to close all open apps on your Mac with a single click in macOS Ventura.
How to create a Siri Shortcut
Creating the shortcut only takes one step and is straightforward. Here’s how to create the shortcut to close all your Mac apps at once.
- Opens abbreviations on your Mac
- tap on Plus icon in the upper right of the app to Create a new shortcut
- In the search bar On the right side of the screen, type “Leave”
- He chooses “quit application” Within the scripting section of the search results
- When the action is added, select “program” from within the work prompt
- He chooses “All apps” from the list
- Choose if you want any apps Stay open when others close by clicking on “exclude” Shortcut text
- Name your shortcut and give it a code to identify it
- Close the shortcut by clicking File Red passcode
All apps close immediately while the shortcut is running, but if you have any unsaved documents, the app icon will bounce in the Dock and the shortcut will continue to work. The Shortcuts Stop icon does not change to Play until you manually close unsaved documents.
There is no change in your mind once you activate the shortcut. All applications will be closed, except for applications with unsaved documents, which includes background applications – such as TextExpander and Keyboard Maestro.
It is possible to set the shortcut, however, to include a prompt asking if you are sure you want to run it. You’ll find this option by looking for “request input” – under scripting – while creating the shortcut.
Shortcut on Mac Dock
You can add this shortcut to the Dock by tapping it with two fingers from within the Shortcuts app and selecting “Add to Dock”. This will make it easier to turn on the feature and more accessible.
Close and done
Shortcut creation is easy to do and requires only one prompt to be executed. The longest part of the setup process will be naming the action and giving it an accompanying token.
Siri Shortcuts are available on Macs running macOS Monterey and later. iOS and iPadOS have a Shortcuts app, but if you try to run the shortcut on them, you’ll get an error message.
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