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.
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.
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?
About Captain Kill Switch on Product Hunt
“Close all your open apps in one click”
Captain Kill Switch launched on Product Hunt on September 12th, 2026 and earned 79 upvotes and 3 comments, placing #14 on the daily leaderboard. 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.
Captain Kill Switch was featured in Windows (12.8k followers), Productivity (661.2k followers), GitHub (41.4k followers) and Menu Bar Apps (12.3k followers) on Product Hunt. Together, these topics include over 199k products, making this a competitive space to launch in.
Who hunted Captain Kill Switch?
Captain Kill Switch was hunted by Simon Crean. A “hunter” on Product Hunt is the community member who submits a product to the platform — uploading the images, the link, and tagging the makers behind it. Hunters typically write the first comment explaining why a product is worth attention, and their followers are notified the moment they post. Around 79% of featured launches on Product Hunt are self-hunted by their makers, but a well-known hunter still acts as a signal of quality to the rest of the community. See the full all-time top hunters leaderboard to discover who is shaping the Product Hunt ecosystem.
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Simon Crean