Hide All Windows on a Mac with Keyboard Shortcuts

We’re going to share several approaches to hide app windows in Mac OS X by using keyboard shortcuts. This is a great collection of tips that will undoubtedly speed up your Mac workflow once you remember the keystrokes and understand how they work.

To be completely clear, hiding a window does just what it sounds like, it hides the app window(s) but does not close them. All of the hidden windows can be made visible again by choosing the application again.

How to Hide ALL Windows in the Active Mac OS X App Instantly

If you need to quickly hide all windows within an active Mac OS X application, just hit Command+H and all the apps windows will become hidden. You can then manually retrieve the windows of the app by clicking through onto the applications Dock icon.

How to Hide All Windows *Except* the Currently Active App / Window

Another great alternative is to hide all the windows on screen except for the currently active window or application. To do this, hit Command+Option+H at any time. This is a great trick to help focus on the task at hand, as literally everything but the most forefront app will be hidden instantly on the Mac screen. Again you can resurface those hidden windows by clicking on the apps Dock icon.

I would recommend combining both of these tips with the ability to make hidden application icons translucent within the Dock, which is activated through a simple Terminal command and it helps to determine which apps are hidden by a visual indicator that is quite obvious. It works great with the use of the aforementioned commands.

Hiding Apps & Windows from the Application Menu in OS X

Any active application menu item can also be used to either hide the current app, or to hide other apps. Just pull down the currently active apps menu bar item (for example, in Safari you would click the Safari menu) and choose either “Hide Appname” or “Hide Others”.

Those menu options are what the keyboard shortcuts are linked to.

Hide away from active apps by Option + Clicking elsewhere

You can also hold down the Option key and click away from a Mac application and it will hide the application or windows being clicked away from.

Remember, hiding windows is not the same as closing windows, though there is a keystroke to close all windows in Mac OS X too. Equally useful to know, just different!

Add keyboard shortcut to hide all windows in the «Windows» pane #162

Comments

uncertainquark commented May 3, 2018 •

Currently, it’s only possible to minimize the current window using the keyboard shortcut «Super+H»

However, there is no option to hide/minimize all the windows at once. The unused shortcut «Super+D» can be assigned to that, as it also falls in line with the traditionally expected paradigm of showing the Desktop.

At the least, it could be an option but I reckon, it will be quite useful as a default too.

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Blast-City commented May 10, 2018 •

I don’t agree with this.

I think that the Super+D should be the default shortcut to go to the last workspace (+). This way seems more in line with elementary work flow where the minimize function doesn’t seem to be an important feature.

Imagine that you’re looking at flowers and suddenly you want to show the desktop. Going to the last workspace achieve the same result. Even the animation is cool since is like you swipe everything out of the way.

From what i’ve read, even the plank minimize function will go away in the future so tt seems a little bit strange that you can’t minimize with the window controls or plank, but you can with with keyboard shortcuts.

What do you think?

If someone want to have a minimize all windows shortcut, just follow this steps:

Install the wmctrl package

create an executable file named wmctrl on the home folder with the following text:

Best Ways to Quickly Hide Windows Applications

Sometimes you don’t want people to see what you are doing

You’ve probably run into the situation at home or at the office where you were doing something confidential on the computer and someone else came by right at that time. If you haven’t planned ahead of time, the only thing you could do is try to minimize the application, which is fairly slow and will give the other person enough time to see what you were doing.

In this article, I’m going to show you a couple of methods for quickly hiding your applications and windows, some of which will be more obvious than others. Depending on who you are trying to hide the windows from (boss, kids, wife, etc), your optimal method may be different.

CTRL + ALT + DEL

My favorite method by far is to simply press CTRL + ALT + DEL and then press Enter. By default the Lock Computer button is highlighted. Pressing the three keys will bring up a dialog with a few options like Lock this computer, Switch user, Log off etc. Pressing Enter will automatically select Lock this computer.

This is the best method to hide everything on your desktop. The only downsides are it’s not very subtle and you have to press the same key combo plus your password to unlock the computer.

If you have a keyboard that has the Windows key on it, you can also press Windows Key + L. This is a much faster method to lock your PC than pressing CTRL + ALT + DEL and then pressing Enter.

Windows Key + D

If you don’t want to have to enter your password again, you can try a different keyboard shortcut. No matter how many programs or windows you have open on your desktop, you can minimize all of them by pressing Windows Key + D.

This will minimize everything that is open on the desktop. Of course, you have to have a Microsoft keyboard that has the actual Windows key on it.

This key combo is very similar to the Show Desktop button that used to be on the taskbar in Windows XP. If you really liked that feature, you can enable the Show Desktop icon in Windows 7 too. I also tested adding the quick launch toolbar to Windows 8 and enabling the Show Desktop icon there too. Windows Key + D also works just fine on Windows 7 and Windows 8 without having to enable the Show Desktop icon.

Screensaver Shortcut

Another nifty way to hide your desktop is to start up the screen saver. All screensavers are stored in Windows using the .SCR file extension. Go ahead and perform a Windows search for *.scr and you should get a list of all the screensavers on your computer.

Now all you have to do is create a shortcut to any of these files on your desktop or quick launch bar. Just double-click on the shortcut and your screensaver starts up automatically, no need to wait for the idle time to kick in!

You can create a shortcut to the .SCR file by right clicking on it, going to Send To and choosing Desktop (create shortcut).

If that’s not fast enough for you or your hands tend to be on the keyboard more than the mouse, then you can also use a program called AutoHotKey to assign a hotkey to run the .SCR file whenever you want. There is a bit of a learning curve to using AutoHotKey, but it is quite powerful even if you use only a small fraction of its features.

Third Party Utilities

All of the methods above require keyboard interaction, which is ok for laptop users, but may be slower for desktop users who have their hands on a mouse most of the time. There are some really good freeware utilities that will let you hide individual applications or all applications using hotkeys or mouse clicks.

Windows Hide Tool

Windows Hide Tool is probably my favorite little program for hiding Windows programs because it’s easy to use and works very effectively. The best part is that it removes the program icon from the Windows taskbar in addition to hiding it from your desktop. This will make it seem like the program wasn’t even running on your system.

Once you install it on your system, a small blue icon will appear in your notification area. By default, clicking on the icon will hide the active window on your desktop. Clicking on the icon again will bring that application back.

If you right-click on the icon, you’ll see a bunch of options like Hide All Windows, Show All Windows, Hidden Windows, etc. Those are all pretty obvious as to what action they will perform.

If you click on Preferences, you’ll be able to set up the hotkeys and change what happens when you either single-click or double-click on the icon in the notification area.

By default, single clicks will hide/show the currently active window. You can change this to multiple combinations or hiding/showing all windows. What’s also cool about the program is that you can set a password when showing a window, closing an application or when opening the preferences dialog for the program.

So even if you leave your computer and someone tries to bring up the hidden program, they will have to type in a password in order to see it. There are no hotkeys set up initially, but you can quickly set them here by clicking in the box and then pressing the key combo you want.

ClickyGone

ClickyGone is another program that pretty much does the same thing, but with different options. Once you install it, an icon will appear in the notification area. Right-click on it and choose Config.

The Start screen tells you the current shortcuts for hiding windows in various ways. To click and hide, for example, you need to press and hold down CTRL + ALT and then click anywhere on a window. That program will disappear and can be bought back by using the Toggle All Windows keyboard shortcut, by right clicking on the icon in the system tray or by pressing the Clicky Gone Menu keyboard shortcut.

It’s worth noting that the program lists out the shortcuts with the modifiers at the end rather than the beginning. For example, to hide the active window, press SHIFT + CTRL and then press \. The way it shows it in the program, you would think you need to press \ and then SHIFT + CTRL, but that won’t work.

On the General tab, you can choose whether to show the icon in the system tray or not, whether to show hidden programs in the system tray and whether to prevent accidental clicks on full screen apps.

All of the screens after Advanced basically let you adjust the hotkeys for performing various tasks like hiding the active window, clicking to hide, showing the ClickyGone menu, etc. The only feature this program doesn’t have that I liked in Windows Hide Tool was the ability to set a password before bringing back hidden windows.

Hopefully, these are enough tools and options for you to properly hide your data and applications from prying eyes. If you have any questions, feel free to comment. Enjoy!

Founder of Online Tech Tips and managing editor. He began blogging in 2007 and quit his job in 2010 to blog full-time. He has over 15 years of industry experience in IT and holds several technical certifications. Read Aseem’s Full Bio

How to hide all tool windows with shortcut key Follow

The default key I think is CTRL+SHIFT+F12.

I have also tried to remap to other key combinations that are working for other actions.

I am using the latest EAP 14.0.x on Linux Mint 17.

The action works while using the mouse.

How do I bring this action back? thanks

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You should just have to map it to the Main Menu > Window Active Tool Window > Hide All Too Windows action in the Keymap settings:

You may want to use the search by short cut button to make sure that CTRL+SHIFT+F12 is not also mapped to something else. If you still have issues, try disabling all third party plug-ins.

Thanks for your quick reply. It is indeed what I have done, I have even changed the mapping suspecting a window manager shortcut that might override this.

However, whatever I choose as keymap, the key just doesn’t react.

I have a very limited number of plugins and I don’t think I have any third-party plugin except atlassian perhaps? I might try to remove it although just to test cause I don’t think could do without.

Any feedback from a linux user, is this feature still working over there, and if so which wm you’re using?

Hi everyone, I am a Zorin OS user, an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution. I too am facing the same problem. I am not able to use the short keys to hide all tool windows in IntelliJ IDEA. ANy help will be appreciated. Thank You

@Jona2jef does it help if you change the default shortcut?

Sadly I don’t use a modern desktop environment like GNOME or KDE which is very customisable, I use XFCE which is very old but snappy and repsonsive. Hence I was not able to change any shortcuts. Thank you for the suggestion sir.

@Jona2jef you could change a default shortcut in IDEA (File | Settings | Keymap).