close-all-windows

Does what it says. Gracfully (no force) closes all open X11 windows. (X11 is a popular display server; basis for most Linux window managers.)

Usage

Desktop Application

close-all-windows ships as a discoverable desktop application (clos-all-windows.desktop file installed in /usr/share/applications). Adding it to your dock or application menu enables you to close all windows with one click.

CLI

NOTE: The script will not execute successfully if you run it from within a window application e.g. a terminal window, because the window running the script will be closed by the script, thus interrupting the script. Run this script from within your window manager or in a background process.

# plain usage
close-all-windows

# view all cli options
close-all-windows --help

# run a callback command
# after all windows closed
# successfully
# e.g. gracefull shutdown
close-all-windows && shutdown -h now

Config file

The config file allows you to customize the close behaviour and cover edge cases. View close-all-windows.conf for more informations.

A default config file will be install under /etc/close-all-windows.conf if installed via package oder manually via make.

If you want to make changes to the config, first copy it to ~/.config/close-all-windows/close-all-windows.conf and edit it there.

GUI

close-all-windows-dialog is a very simple GUI front-end for this script.

Install from Repository

• ArchLinux AUR
• Ubuntu ppa

Manual install

Super user permission might be required for the following steps (sudo or su).

• install ruby and wmctrl
  • Ubuntu: apt-get install ruby wmctrl
  • Arch: pacman -S ruby wmctrl
• download and unpack source package
• inside unpacked source directory run make PREFIX=/usr install

ToDo

TODO List

Issues

• Some windows are not (yet) recognized, e.g. the steam client
• Some windows won't close entirely but only go into the background e.g. skype (see config file for work around)
• Some window managers (e.g. i3-wm) don't react to wmctrl -c

Feature requests

So the tool works perfectly for my use case. But possibly you'll need something extra. I'm a lazy person, so you'll have to request these features/enhancements, else I won't move my butt.