XSweep
A macOS menu bar app that closes everything you have open, in one click — and tells you how much memory you just got back.
curl -fsSL https://xstral.com/xsweep.sh | bash
Builds on your Mac in a few seconds. No password required.
What it does
macOS has no button that closes everything. Quitting eleven apps by hand means eleven trips to the menu bar, and you still forget two of them.
Everything, in one click
One button quits every open app. It's an ordinary Quit, so anything holding unsaved work still gets to ask you about it first — nothing is thrown away behind your back.
What it's costing you
Every app is listed with the memory it actually holds, heaviest first — summed across all its hidden helper processes, so a browser reads 1.3 GB rather than the 160 MB it likes to claim.
Pin what you keep
Click an app's icon and it's spared, now and every time after. Your music keeps playing and your editor stays open while the other twelve close.
Handles the ones that argue
Apps that ignore the request get named, not silently skipped. Bring them forward to answer their save dialog, ask again, or force them closed — your call, never automatic.
Undo the whole thing
Cleared the wrong desk? Reopen brings back everything that sweep just closed, in one click, for as long as the panel is open.
Never touch the menu bar
A global shortcut sweeps from anywhere, and option-clicking the icon skips the panel entirely. It can launch at login and show a live count beside the icon.
How it got here
One version so far. It quits apps; there isn't much more to say yet.
Version 1.0 First release
Built in an afternoon because macOS still has no way to close everything at once. The first cut fired all the quits and declared victory half a second later, which looked broken — apps take longer than that to actually exit. It now waits for each one, names the holdouts, and reports what you got back.
Why a command instead of a download
macOS attaches a com.apple.quarantine flag to anything a
browser downloads. Gatekeeper then refuses to open quarantined apps that
aren't signed with a paid Apple Developer ID and notarized by Apple — and
on Apple Silicon the dialog reads “the app is damaged and can't be
opened”, which is alarming and simply untrue.
Command-line tools don't set that flag, and software compiled on your own machine was never downloaded at all. So there's nothing to quarantine and nothing to warn about.
Worth saying plainly: this doesn't make XSweep
verified — it means macOS stops asking. Piping a script into a
shell is also how plenty of malware arrives. That's why this one fetches
readable source rather than a binary, checks it against a published
SHA-256, and never asks for sudo. Read it first if you like:
curl -fsSL https://xstral.com/xsweep.sh | less
Other ways to install
The installer takes options, and you can always build it yourself.
# install somewhere else, and don't launch afterwards curl -fsSL https://xstral.com/xsweep.sh | bash -s -- --to ~/Applications --no-launch # or build it by hand curl -fsSL https://xstral.com/xsweep-1.0.tar.gz | tar -xz cd xsweep-1.0 && ./build.sh
Building needs the Xcode Command Line Tools — xcode-select --install. Nothing else.
