10 Tips For Minimizing Windows On a Mac

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here are some tips for using the Minimize Windows feature on your Mac. 

So when you're using your Mac you often have more than one window open at the same time. Having a lot of windows open can be really distracting. One technique you can use to manage these windows is to minimize them. You can minimize a window to get it out of the way temporarily without closing the window. So the basics are you click this yellow button at the top left corner of the window. Like this is a Pages document here and I click this yellow button it will minimize into the Dock. Then if I want to go back to that window I just go back to the Dock and find that window. It is a little representation of what's in the window along with the app icon. If I click on it then that window comes back. I can easily get some windows out of the way to focus on the window I want and then bring these back when I'm ready to work with them again.

Now there are three ways to minimize a window. One of them I have already showed you which is to click the yellow button. But you can also go to the Window Menu and choose Minimize. This does exactly the same thing. A third option is to use the keyboard shortcut. You saw it there when I used the Window Menu next to Minimize. It is Command M. So Command M will simply minimize the current window. If I want to minimize this one now another Command M. There is actually fourth way to minimize windows but you have to turn it On in System Settings first. You go into System Settings and then go to Desktop & Dock. Then look for the option Window Titlebar Double Click Action. You can set this to minimize. So with this set to minimize you can double click the titlebar and it will act just like you were acting click on the yellow button.

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Now there is also a variation on the Menu item Minimize. If you hold the option key down minimize changes to Minimize Off. This will minimize all the windows but only the ones for the current app. The Menu here is for Pages as you can see here on the left. So choosing this will minimize all three open windows for Pages at once. I can look here and see them all in the Dock. When you do have windows minimized the way to bring them back, of course, is to click on them here in the Dock. But there are other ways. For instance you can use the Window Menu. If you look here you will see a list of all of the current windows. There will be a checkmark next to the active window. Other windows will be shown here and you can switch to them by selecting that window there in the window menu. In addition, if you look for the diamond icon here you'll see Minimize Windows. So this is the window I minimized before. I can bring it back here. It will bring it out of the Dock and it will restore it and make it the current window I'm working on.

You can also bring back windows by going to the Dock icon for the app, in this case Pages. If I Control click, right click, or two-finger click on a trackpad or simply just click and hold I'll get the Context Menu and I'll see the same listing of all the windows here with a checkmark next to the current window, other windows listed as well  and a diamond next to any minimized windows and I can bring back the window, like that. 

Incidentally, there is no official word for brining back a minimized window. You can simply say you are restoring the window, you can say you're activating the window, you can say you are bringing it back. Some people use the term unminimize which really isn't a word but kind of describes what you're doing. Some people say deminimize or deminiaturize is actually used on some places as well. 

Here's one more way to bring back minimized windows. I'm going to minimize two out of the three Pages windows here and you can see them here in the Dock. Now if you were to use Mission Control, say with Control Up Arrow here, you would notice that you don't see Minimize Windows. You would just have to access them in the Dock here the same way you would do even if you weren't using Mission Control. But if you use App Expose which is Control Down Arrow, then you get to see all of the current windows for the App you're using. In addition an app like Pages you can see recently opened documents down here and Minimize Windows. So I can now click on one of these and it will bring the minimized window back. 

Now when you minimize a window, like this, and let's say you switch to another app and you switch back say using the App Switcher, Command Tab, I go back to Pages it just brings the frontmost window that isn't minimized to the front. The one that is minimized is still there. It stays there. Anyway I switch back to the app, like say clicking on the Dock icon, choosing it in Spotlight, whatever I'm doing it is not going to bring back any minimized window. This is one of the negative features of Minimize feature. If you minimize all of these windows here, say all of these Page's windows and switch to another app, let's say use the App Switcher to go back to Pages, nothing happens. Pages is running. It has three open windows but they are all minimized here and simply switching back to the app does't unminimized any of them. Well, at least switching back using the App Switcher. If you switch back to the app another way, using the Dock, it will take the topmost window and unminimized it. So it brings it back. It won't do that with the others, it will just do it if all of the windows are currently minimized. 

So, for instance, here with Calendar if I were to minimize Calendar and then go in the Dock here and click on Calendar again, it brings it back. I don't need to go to the right side of the Dock to do that. Calendar just has that one window. I minimize it. I click on it in the Dock again and it brings it back. 

Now if you minimize windows a lot you're going to end up with a lot of stuff on the right side of the Dock. However, you can avoid that with a setting in System Settings here. If you go to Desktop & Dock and then look for Minimize Windows into Application Icon. This changes something fundamental about minimizing windows. So if I have that on look what happens if I minimize this window. It doesn't go to the right side of the Dock. It seems to go down into the App Icon and I can minimize each window like that. Now you can see I've got nothing on the right side of the Dock. If I Control Click, Right Click, or Two-finger Click, or just Click and Hold on the app icon there I can see the same menu I saw before and I can bring back the minimize windows this way just like before. I can also just use the window menu assuming I'm in the right app and bring them back that way. All that was available before. So all of this option does is it stops the windows appearing on the right side of the Dock. Some people may like the items there and some people may not. So it is up to you. 

Now it is important to note that minimizing works a little different when you have Stage Manager turned on. I'm going to go to Control Center here and turn on Stage Manager so you can see my different sets here to the left. So I can switch to anyone of these sets as you would if using Stage Manager. But let's say you're in Pages and I've got these 3 windows here. If I minimize notice it goes to the left side, like that. You can minimize this one and you can see how they disappear here like that. I can bring it back one-by-one by clicking in Stage Manager. You can even do it if you have one window open. So I'll go here in Calendar and I'll minimize this window here. You can see how it goes into Stage Manager. I can bring it back. So minimizing works pretty smoothly with Stage Manager. In fact if you like minimizing in Windows then Stage Manager is kind of the next step there. It divides up all of your windows into individual apps. You can still combine windows from different apps into different app sets here on the left. I won't go into too much detail here about Stage Manager. But if you're someone that has a lot of apps open and is always minimizing all of these different windows to just have the ones you want, then Stage Manager may actually be the ideal way to work for you. So you may want to give it a try. 

Now a full alternative to minimizing windows you may want to do what I do. I rarely minimize windows. Instead I Hide Apps. So I'm using Pages here and I've got 3 windows open in Pages. If I choose Pages and then Hide Pages or simply just Command H, it hides all three of those windows. Here In Calendar I've got one window open and I can do Command H to hide that window. Under Notes, if I want, I can go to Command Others, Option Command H. It will hide everything but Notes. All this stuff is still running. You can still see it here. Windows are minimized. The apps are just hidden right now. I can easily bring them back using either the Dock or, unlike minimizing, the App Switcher. So I can go back to Pages here with the App Switcher and bring back all of Pages windows. 

But there is another way you may want to handle it. You can just quit the app. So here I've got three Pages windows. Maybe I've even made a change here, like that. I haven't even Saved. If I do Command Q or Pages Quit, all those windows go away and you may think now that it would be hard to get them back or perhaps maybe I've lost my pages. But that is not the case. If I go and launch Pages again all of those windows will return and the change is still there. This only works if in System Settings under Desktop & Dock you've got it setup so that you do not Close Windows when quitting an application. This is turned Off here. The windows don't actually close. The app just quits and then resumes when you launch the app again. The result is very much the same as hiding the app or minimizing all the windows and then bringing them all back. I can quit Pages. I can go back to Pages like this and all of the windows are there. I can do the same thing even with Safari. I've got 3 tabs open. Here's a window and I can quit Safari. I can go back to safari and it reopens that window and reopens those 3 tabs.

So you can minimize Windows. You can Hide the App. Or you can just Quit the app and resume it by just relaunching later. The same is true for closing a Window. For instance, here I am in this window here. I'll do another change. Go to Auto-Save when I close the window and I can easily go to File, Open Recent and bring that window back. A lot of times people leave documents in Windows open just because they think they may need them later in the day or tomorrow or sometime in the next few days. But you can just Close it and open the document again. It even works in non-document apps like that 3 tab Window here in Safari. If I were to close the Window and go History and then reopen the last closed Window. So there's even a way to do it in that situation. If you find you're leaving apps running with Windows open and find you're not using them for days on end, you may want to reconsider how easy it is to close that Window, close that document or even just Quit the whole app and then resume later. 

There's one more setting I want to show you that is just cosmetic. You control the animation you get when you minimize a window. So here I'll click the minimize button and here it is going to animate going into the Dock. That animation is called the Genie effect. Here I'll play it again but slowed down so you can see exactly what it is doing. It's kind of squeezing the window into the Dock. It does the same thing when you unminimized, just in reverse. But if you go into System Settings and you go to Desktop & Dock you'll notice there's a way to change from Genie effect to Scaled effect. So now when you minimize it simply does that. Here I'll slow it down for you so you can see what this does. It's actually a little bit faster so you may like it just because of that. 

So if you like to minimize the windows on your Mac I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.