Fire

When you close an application, subprocesses can sometimes be left running. They often serve no purpose and only use up system resources without any visible indication that they are still active.

Fire is a small application that offers a solution to this issue. While it is running, you can use the Shift+F4 hotkey while a program is in the foreground to “Kill it with Fire”, which means the entire process tree, with all subprocesses, will be shut down.

Not all applications perform the necessary cleanup operations when they are closed, especially when you use the Alt+F4 hotkey. Subprocesses can be left behind, often for no reason.

Fire kills the application while also shutting down all subprocesses that were created by it. Of course, these subprocesses may sometimes be important, so make sure you won’t lose valuable data when using this function.

Once launched, the program is sent to the system tray. When you want to “kill something with fire” you can just use the Shift+F4 hotkey and then confirm the action. The ID of the process is displayed, along with a warning.

However, it is not possible to disable the confirmation dialog, which may end up being quite annoying if you use this function very often. While shutting down an entire process tree can be dangerous, many users will likely find the confirmation dialog to be unnecessary.

In the end, Fire is a small, basic piece of software that can be useful if you frequently close applications that leave unnecessary subprocesses behind. It ensures that the whole process tree is shut down, thus freeing up system resources and avoiding other issues.

It is very lightweight, only runs in the system tray and can be used with the Shift+F4 hotkey. However, we would like to be able to disable the confirmation dialog when closing a process tree.