If the containers are related you could use docker-compose, which has commands to stop / restart/ remove all containers at once.

I often just do

docker ps | awk "{print $1}" | xargs docker stop

Add some filtering in there and you're golden

This works but I'd just create a function and use that instead of creating an alias that creates a function and then calls itself.

if your containers are created with a docker compose file you can use docker-compose to target them all

I don't know if this works in docker (usually there is 1:1 equivalency between the two), but with podman you can do something like:

podman stop --filter name=foo

man podman-stop tells us:

   --filter, -f=filter
       Filter what containers are going to be stopped.  Multiple filters can be given with multiple uses of the --filter flag.  Filters with the same  key  work
       inclusive with the only exception being label which is exclusive. Filters with different keys always work exclusive.

Just a few shortcuts that may help:

• docker ps is an alias for docker container ls
• as long as it can be uniquely identified, a prefix of the container ID can be used instead of copy pasting the entire ID
• you can use container names instead of IDs
• tab completion works for container names

As someone else suggested though, docker compose is probably best suited for this job, but hopefully this helps in other situations.

You can use the container names to address containers. Whether this is a randomly generated name (docker run... with no --name flag), the compose working dir and service name, or the compose container_name var.

I also rarely use the container command. docker is sufficient, or docker compose ... while in the working dir of a given compose stack.

My better way is just using Portainer, select some containers and hit the stop button.

Why create the function _dcl()?

You can of course do it this way too, it's just extra typing:

docker container stop $(docker container ls -qf name=snikket)

I'm using docker packages for Doom Emacs. The main one is docker.el. On top of being faster and easier to use than the cli, you can also do some pretty neat stuff like use dired+tramp to browse files and open them in Emacs.