Closing and terminating
You can get rid of a window from the switcher without switching to it first. There are two different things you might mean, and AltTab keeps them apart.
| Close | Terminate | |
|---|---|---|
| Gesture | Delete, the × on a row, or Close in the context menu | Shift+Delete, Shift+click the ×, or Terminate in the menu |
| What it does | Asks the window to close, the same as clicking its own close button | Ends the process outright |
| Unsaved work | The application can prompt you, and can refuse | Lost. Nothing is asked and nothing is saved |
| Other windows of that process | Unaffected | Go with it |
Close is what you want almost always. Terminate is for an application that has stopped responding — which the switcher shows you, by giving a row that is not responding its own background colour.
Doing it without leaving the switcher
Closing a window leaves the switcher open, so several can be dealt with one after another. The row fades and slides out as its window goes, over [General] RowCloseAnimationMs (default 100 ms, 0 for no animation) — long enough to see which row went, which matters when you are closing several.
A row only fades once the close was really issued. If it could not be — terminating a process owned by another account fails, for instance — the row stays as it is rather than pretending something happened.
The × appears on the row under the pointer when [MouseHover] ShowDeleteButton is on. It is worked out from where the row is at the moment you click, not from where it was drawn, so scrolling with the wheel and then clicking cannot close a window you were not pointing at.
All of them at once
Close All and Terminate All, in the row's context menu or the tray menu, apply to every window in the list — the list as filtered, so typing a name first is how you close one application's windows and nothing else.
Both ask for confirmation first. [General] PromptTerminateAll turns the question off if you would rather it did not ask; Terminate All without a prompt is worth thinking about before you switch it off.
When it does not work
A window owned by an elevated process cannot be closed or terminated by a process that is not elevated. Windows refuses it, AltTab reports nothing happened, and the row stays. Run AltTab elevated (Always run as Administrator in the tray menu) if you need this for administrator windows.
Some windows also simply decline to close — a document with unsaved changes, a modal dialog waiting for an answer. That is the application's decision, and Close respecting it is the point of the distinction on this page.