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September 12, 2006
Vishy's Possibly Useful Factoid: Closing multiple windows together in Windows
To me, the taskbar grouping feature of Windows XP (or as some know it, Windows FP, for "Fisher Price") is a source of great consternation. While it saves me plenty of taskbar real estate, the grouping and ungrouping algorithms are entirely outside user control. Ordinarily, this wouldn't be a problem, but it is one of my pet annoyances that these algorithms are arbitrary and somewhat braindead about when they group and ungroup taskbar buttons (as an aside, I should note here that the Gnome desktop environment lets the user explicitly group and ungroup taskbar buttons).
Some aspects of Windows are plain idiotic, but they may merely hide a savant nature. One of my favorite parts about the taskbar grouping feature is the ability to close all windows in a group at once. I discovered by chance today how one could close multiple windows together as a group even if they aren't all part of the same group on the taskbar. I am about to reveal the secret of window closing on overdrive—the power of multiple selection brought to taskbar buttons.
Hold down the Ctrl and Shift keys and click on the taskbar buttons of all the windows you want to close. They will all depress, just like the button of the currently active window. Release the keys and right click on any of the buttons for the same menu that appears when you right click on an ordinary group. You can now close all of them, or cascade and tile only the ones you chose, if you are into that.
Go forth, grasshopper, and banish all those stray popups and windows that you forgot you even opened.
P.S.: In case you didn't know about this other, less obscure tip, hold down Shift as you click on the Close (X) button of any window to close other windows of the application ("related windows") at the same time.
Posted by Vishy at September 12, 2006 08:36 PM