How "gracefully" are you talking? There are multiple ways to close a program. The batch file/PowerShell method might be graceful or not, depending on exactly which commands you used. One option is to forcefully terminate each process/process group before shut down. There are also commands to gracefully ask a program to terminate. Generally it's the same command (taskkill/Stop-Process), without the /f/-force parameter. You can also interact with the program's GUI to close it, eg. using Alt+F4 keyboard shortcut,or clicking the X button in the top right (if there is one), or using File->Close in the menu bar (if it has one), or right-clicking the program icon in the taskbar and selecting Close Window. Applications may respond differently between graceful requests to terminate from the OS, and the GUI options to close. For example you mentioned Chrome, where the behaviour to automatically reopen tabs only occurs if the GUI is used to close the browser (and the option to automatically restore tabs is set), but not if you forcefully close it via command line (taskkill /f /IM chrome.exe). However it will restore tabs if you do it gracefully (taskkill /IM chrome.exe). Not all programs will necessarily behave the same way, however both Chrome and Word do.If you want to ensure you get the desired behaviour, the only reliable way to reproduce a GUI close is to use automation tools to simulate the same GUI interaction. You mentioned AutoHotKey in another comment, and yes that's one solution to achieve this. The problem is, if you want to automate this GUI interaction you also need to handle scenarios where the program refuses to close. Like in Word or Notepad, if you have an unsaved document, the GUI methods will prompt the user to save changes first. Each program will behave differently, so you'll need to account for every app you might possibly have open, and the different behaviours it might have to different states. At that point you either have an overly complicated automation, or you only have partial automation with user intervention required to handle any exceptions. Or you just accept the fact that terminating gracefully via command line is the easiest solution, even if some applications might not handle it the way you want. If you're willing to dig deeper, you might be interested in ARSO. But it'll only work with applications that explicitly support it, and I don't know of any way to trigger it manually. More on reddit.com

With the HotkeyP, you can create any shortcut to kill the active program/window, use the command "Terminate process". HotkeyP - keyboard/mouse/gamepad mapper (AutoHotkey alternative - but much easier to use, lightweight, many features, e.g. macros, hide window, opacity, change wallpaper, magnifier, volume, mute, disable key - like CapsLock...) More on reddit.com

Alt+F4 More on reddit.com

It becomes so bad that you have to buy a whole new computer. Why would you have to buy a new computer when you can simply clean install? More on reddit.com