Universal Terminate Application keystroke

microsoft / PowerToys

Windows system utilities to maximize productivity

MIT License

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Universal Terminate Application keystroke #22979

Open kchawla-pi opened 1 year ago

kchawla-pi commented 1 year ago

Description of the new feature / enhancement

It would be great if we could have a universal Terminate Application keystroke, like Mac's Cmd+Q; maybe via PowerToys? Currently, Alt+F4 does not end applications which close to the System Tray. Maybe Win+Shift+Q

Scenario when this would be used?

To quickly end applications without needing to navigate menus or using the mouse in the system tray. There are many such apps which are designed to stay running in the System Tray such as steam, Epic Games Store, Teams. But Many a times people (like me) may want to quickly open Teams and then exit it. Without going through the hassle of changing settings and committing to a specific behavior, such a shortcut will allow one to quickly end the application when they wish to, or leave it running as normal.

Supporting information

No response

crutkas commented 1 year ago

I understand the ask but I don't think this will be possible without force quitting the application as well as a deep knowledge of every application. There will be large sum of edge cases.

For instance

PowerToys: PowerToys main exe, runner, is what powers the systray but as an end user, you would interact with one of the edge applications. If you tried and quit the settings app, it is actually a totally different EXE. Approach maybe would be see if we could see which app called the child app and terminate the top most.
Edge/Chrome/Calculator: multi-instances, scan for all instances and terminate
Steam: Would bet they have different apps, one for serivce/systray and one that is GUI
Apps from different users
What happens if someone does this with File Explorer

kchawla-pi commented 1 year ago

It would be how MacOS handles it. I don't know if it would be feasible to emulate this behavior on Windows, but the CMD+Q keystrokes ends the application and all processes started by it. For MacOS's File Explorer (Finder) the command does not work.

All applications in Windows do have a 'Terminate the Whole Application' command - in Steam, one can right click the SysTray icon and select Quit, in PyCharm there is File>Exit . During Shutdown, Windows invokes these to terminate running applications, suggesting there is some universal interface to send the Graceful Exit Signal to any and all apps. Maybe that could be tapped into.