How do I close all windows in Mac?

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I came across this nifty tip one fine lazy Saturday afternoon. One quick key combination closes all the windows of the active application. It saved me so much of head ache and may will help you too.

This is what happened. I was going through all my stored music on an external hard disk – it was a lazy Saturday afternoon, after all! I had selected more than 200 folders and was about to transfer them to the drive on the Mac.

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Just then I noticed a folder that should have been empty. I wanted to check it’s contents. I double-clicked and this is when all hell broke loose.
To repeat, I had 200+ folders selected and then I double-clicked on one of them!

Finder started opening ALL of the folders in individual windows. Rightly so, because all of them were selected.

Though I have the latest Macbook Pro, things came to a stand still as I started getting one Finder window after the other on the screen. When the process finally finished (must have taken 3-4 minutes… seemed like eternity), I was left with the daunting task of closing 200+ windows.

I’ll be honest! I did start closing the open windows one by one. But after a few seconds, I realised that this will take too much time. I quickly searched the internet and came across these gems – How to close all open windows of an application in one go!

Keyboard shortcut of closing all windows on the Mac

As you probably know, the keyboard shortcut Command + W closes the active window.
But if you use the “Option” key too – as in Command + Option + W – all open windows of the application will close immediately.

Close all open windows of an application on the Mac

Another way to go about it is to hold down the Option key, take the cursor to “File” in the top menu and select “Close All”. FYI, by default, only “Close” is visible in the menu and it changes to “Close All” when the Option key is pressed.

Command + W Closes the active window
Command + Option + W Closes all the windows of the selected application
Option + File -> Close All Closes all the windows of the selected application

So if you ever have tens of programs windows open, simply use the Command + Option + W key-combination to close everything. It saves a whole lot of time. Trust me!

Check out all other convenient keyboard shortcuts on the Mac that an old Windows user like me found extremely useful.

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