How To Quickly Switch Between Apps and Windows On a Mac

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's look at how you can quickly switch between apps and app windows on your Mac. 

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Now let's say you have a situation like this where you've got many apps and many app windows open. I've got a bunch of Pages windows open. Some TextEdit things. Some Finder windows. I've got Reminders. I've got Calendar. I also have on different Desktops the Safari browser and the Mail App. So there's a lot of things going on here. How can you quickly switch between all of these to get to the app you want and more specifically, the right window in the app. I'm going to show you a variety of techniques starting out only using the Trackpad and Mouse and gradually moving over to only using the Keyboard.

So, of course, a lot of this is going to involve using Mission Control. So let's go and check our Settings for Mission Control. I'm going to go into System Preferences. Now I'm not going to go directly into Mission Control but instead into both Trackpad and Mouse to see the Settings there. In Trackpad under More Gestures you can see I've got Swipe Between Full Screen Apps, Swipe Left or Right with Three Fingers, and I have Mission Control set to Swipe Up with Three Fingers. I also have a Mouse connected to this Mac at the same time and under More Gestures for the Mouse I've got Swipe Between Full Screen Apps, Left or Right with Two Fingers, and Mission Control Double Tap with Two Fingers. Then, of course, under Mission Control here are the Keyboard Shortcuts for Mission Control. In this case I have Control Up. For Application Windows I have Control down. 

It's important to check these to make sure you have them turned On and they are set the same way else what I'm going to show you isn't going to work. 

So let's start here and activate Mission Control. I'm going to use three fingers and swipe up to go into Mission Control. If I move the pointer up to the top here you can see I've got three spaces. The first is Desktop 1 with a whole bunch of windows. Then I've got Safari and Mail as full screen apps. Now that I'm here I can easily switch to one of those full screen apps just by clicking on it. I can do three fingers up again and I can switch to the other one. Three fingers up again and I can go to this Desktop. But on this Desktop notice when I go into Mission Control I see all the different windows. They're all over the place here. All I need to do is point to the one that I want and it will bring that app to the front and that window is the front-most window. So I click here and I get Pages and I have that window right here in the front. 

Now to switch between spaces I can just use three fingers on the Trackpad, left or right. So three fingers left and I go to the next space which was the browser and three fingers to the left and I go to the space with Mail. I can go back as well. If I go into Mission Control, three fingers up, I can still use three fingers left and right to go between the spaces which makes it easy to say if I'm in Safari here and I go into Mission Control. I can go three fingers to the left and now I've got all these windows and I can select the one that I want and it brings that App and that window to the front. So on the Mouse I'm going to double tap with two fingers and now it brings up Mission Control like before. I swipe left and right with two fingers and I can then, of course, point to the window I want, click on it, and it comes to the front.

Now there's another way to do everything completely with the Trackpad or Mouse. That's to use the Dock. In the Dock at the bottom you'll see all of your apps, the runs that are running with a dot under it unless you've changed your settings, and on the right you'll see apps that aren't even normally in the Dock but they are currently running. Now you can switch to any app you want by simply clicking on it. So I can switch say to Calendar by clicking on it and it brings that to the front. If the app is in another space, like Safari, it will jump to that space. Now if I go into the Dock again and say I want to go to Pages I can click there and it goes to the space with the Pages windows in it. Now let's say I want to go to a specific window in Pages. Well, I can click and hold and I will get a list here that shows me all the windows. I see old documents as well. These are recent documents but you could see the window icon next to the open windows and I can select which one I want and it will bring that one to the front. 

So if you want you can avoid Mission Control entirely and just use the Dock  to navigate to exactly what you want. If you're like me and always use the Hide Command to hide an app when you're not using it you could still use the Dock to get to it. You can either click on the app icon to Unhide it or you could go directly to a window and Unhide the app and go to that window at the same time. But if you like the practice of minimizing, when you minimize you could bring a window back the same way. Whereas using Mission Control won't necessarily let you do that. So while the Dock isn't probably the fastest way to access your windows and apps it is a little bit more powerful and it's a little easier to understand since it's always just down there at the bottom and you can see everything right there in one strip and get to any window. 

Now let's talk about doing this all, partially, with the keyboard. I find it much easier to access Mission Control with the keyboard. Control Up Arrow is what normally gets you there. Then you can use your mouse or trackpad to select the window you want and bring that to the front. So this is the way I actually do it because I use the keyboard and the trackpad all the time together. I don't try to just stick with one or the other. Then using the keyboard shortcut to start Mission Control makes sense and then using the trackpad to select what I want also makes sense to me. 

Now if you try to go entirely with the keyboard you run into one difficulty. You can certainly use Control Right Arrow and Left Arrow to go through the spaces. You can use Control Up Arrow to go into Mission Control. But you can't select a window here using just the keyboard. There is no way to use the Arrows or the Tab Key or anything to select a window there. I wish Apple would add this but it's never been there. However, there is another mode. You remember back in System Preferences there was that Application Window shortcut. This is also known as Expose or App Expose. You do Control Down Arrow you get a very different view. Here you'll be looking at the app you're currently using and you see all the windows arranged there. Now you can use the Arrow keys to select a window or a recent document here and then spacebar will actually make it a little larger for you to see and Return will actually bring that app to the front and bring the window to the front. So, Control Down Arrow and then use the arrow keys to navigate around. Select a window. Return and you can get to any window in the current app that way. 

But you could also jump between apps. Control Down Arrow and then Tab will go to the next app and through all of them. When you get to the one that you want you can then use the arrow keys to select the window that you want and Return brings it to the front. So this only works with apps that aren't full screen. So you could use Control Right Arrow and Left Arrow to go between full screen apps and other spaces and you could use Control Down to view all of these and use the arrow keys and the tab keys to navigate around between all those apps and all of those windows. That's one way to do it completely by keyboard.

Another way to do it is to use Command Tab. When you press Command Tab it brings up the App Switcher. Continue to hold the Command key down while you tap Tab and you go through all of your applications. When you select an application that has windows it brings all those windows to the front. If you select an application that's full screen it jumps to that space. Then I could easily jump back to that Desktop that has all those windows on it by selecting any app that has a window there like Reminders. Now when you select an app that has multiple windows you're going to get the last window we had up front being up front now. But you can use Command and the Back Tic Key, that's the key above the Tab on American keyboards, and you can cycle through all the windows there. So you could go through all of your apps and then cycle through the windows using Command Tab and then Command Back Tic. One place where this falls down a little bit is if you minimize a window into the Dock. Now I can cycle through only the open windows. I can't bring up a minimized window. If you like to minimize windows this could be a problem. 

Another way to use the keyboard is to select the Dock using just the keyboard. Check in System Preferences under Keyboard, under Shortcuts, and look under Keyboard here and you'll find Move Focus to the Dock. In my case Control F3 and it shows I need to use the fn key the way I'm setup. So that's how I can bring up the Dock. I'll just do that and you could see the Dock is now selected at the bottom and I could use the arrow keys to move back and forth. Any app that's there I can simply press Return and it brings that app to the front. Now if there are several windows I can still use that. I can go here to Pages. I can do the Up Arrow. Select the window I want and Return and it will bring Pages to the front with that window. Now let's say I've minimized something. I can still do it. It will show minimized windows here in the Dock and Return will Unminimize it.

Now here are some other tips. Notice when I went into Mission Control here, so Control and Up Arrow, the windows for different apps were all over the place. Here I've got two windows for TextEdit. Here I've got three for Pages. It would be nice if they were grouped together. In fact they can be very easily. Let's go back into System Preferences here and let's go to Mission Control. I'm going to check Group Windows By Application. Now watch how much nicer it is. I'll go into Mission Control and look at how the two TextEdit windows are right next to each other. These three Pages windows are also right on top of each other. I can select anyone I want and it will come to the front. It's a much nicer way to view what you've got going on here. It even puts these nice little app icons right there. So if you're not sure what app this is it makes it clear by showing the icon below. 

Now let's also talk about Tabs because sometimes you've got apps that have got one window but multiple Tabs. One of those is Safari. Let me go over there and you could see there are three tabs here at the top. So there's a whole other set of keyboard shortcuts for navigating tabs. If you go to window here you could see Next Tab, Previous Tab so it's Control and then Tab, and then Shift Control Tab to go the other way. So I can just easily go between these three tabs here. If I use the App Switcher to go to the Finder here, the Finder I've got Tabs as well here at the top. Of course I can just click on them to go to each tab but if I want to stick with using the Mouse or Trackpad. But Control Tab will also allow me to navigate those tabs. Shift Control Tab will go backwards. 

Here's another tip. Anytime you're in an app you could always go to the window Menu and there will be a list of Windows right here. Even if you minimize a window you'll still see it here and can Unminimize it by going into the window menu. You don't have to use the Dock at all. So those are a lot of different methods I showed you. Of course you don't need to use or even remember all of them. You just need to pick the method for switching between apps and app windows that you like best and just use that. When you do that it becomes rather simple and you don't even have to think about it. You just know how to navigate around to the different things you've got going on while you're getting your work done. 

I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.