Use Hide Instead Of Minimize On Your Mac

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. On this episode I'm going to show you why you never need to use the yellow minimize button to hide windows.

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So I use my Macs 60+ hours a week. I write, I make videos, I develop apps, I develop websites. I do all sorts of things with all sorts of different apps. The one thing I never do is click the little yellow button at the top left hand corner of a window. I still see Mac users doing this all the time. But it really is an antiquated technique to hide a window. There are better ways to do it.

So first let's look at what this button does. This little yellow button here is what I'm talking about. It's the minimize button. You know it's called that because if we go to the window menu the command Minimize is equivalent to this. As a matter of fact if you use Minimize you'll see this yellow button flash. Now what this does when I click it by default is it seems to shrink the window into the Dock and you can see a little icon version of the window in the Dock here. You can click on it and it brings it back. You can shrink all sorts of windows into the Dock from different apps. Then you can click on the one you want to bring it back.

You can modify this behavior by going to System Preferences, then Dock, and there's a checkbox here for Minimize windows into application icon. If you select that then each window minimizes into the icon, in this case Pages. In order to bring it back I need to Control click on the icon, or click and hold on the icon, and then I can select the Window here and it will bring it back. You can also go to Window and then select it there to bring it back whether it's minimized into the app icon or to the right side of the Dock.

What I see people doing a lot is using this button to get something out of the way. So perhaps they don't actually have two windows open here. They just want to get Pages out of the way so they can get to other things. So they minimize the window. Then I see people with a whole list of minimized icons here on the right side of the Dock. But there's a much better alternative to that. That is to Hide the app.

If you go to the App menu you'll find Hide and the name of the app here. The keyboard shortcut, almost always, is Command H. So you can use this and the app just goes away in a flash. You can bring it back by using the App Switcher. So hold down Command and then tab until you get to the app and then release the Command key and it unhides the app. You can also unhide the app anyway that you actually launch an application. So I'll use Command H to hide. If I go to the Dock and I click on the icon, just like i were launching the app, it just unhides it since it's already running. Or I could use Launchpad or I could use the Spotlight menu. Any way I would normally launch the app. If the app is already running it simply unhides it.

The great thing about this is that it Hides all the windows at once which is usually what people want. So I'll reopen that last document here and I've got two windows open now. If I just want to get Pages out of the way instead of minimizing both of these I can do Command H and both go away. Then I could switch back to the app and both will appear. So I have both windows there at the same time.

The only advantage to minimizing seems to be if you have multiple windows open then you can hide one of them by minimizing it. But it's not as big as an advantage today as it used to be. For instance, it's very easy to simple Close a document. To open it you can just go to File, Open Recent and there it is. It opens just as fast as it takes to unminimize out of the Dock again. So I see a lot of people leaving documents open, but minimized, when actually they could just close them and reopen them the next time they need them.

Another reason that minimize isn't needed as much anymore is that we don't always use multiple windows. Years ago it would be normal, say in a browser, to have multiple browser windows open. But now we don't do that. We have Tabs. I'll do Command Tab here to open another tab and you can have three, four, five tabs open and switch to different webpages in the tabs. So now it's one window and easy to hide that app, Command H. Minimizing doesn't give you any advantage over that except perhaps cluttering up your Dock or maybe even forgetting that you've got this other window open here but just minimized. It's better to just Hide and then unhide.

Now we can use tabs in almost any app. So, for instance in pages here if I were to open up this second document here. Sure I can have these in separate windows but I could bring them all together and have them in tabs just like I do in the browser. Then to Hide them I can Command H and, of course, using tabs means that I'm only viewing one at a time anyway. So you can almost think of any tab that you're not actually looking at as being, kind of, minimized into the tabs here.

Another option you've got is simply to Quit an app. Here I've got two tabs open. I'm working on two documents. I don't even need to Save because saving is automatic now the way modern apps work. So I could add something here, for instance. I'm never going to Save. What I'm going to do is just do Command Q to quit. Now if I run the app again it will relaunch the app and bring back those two tabs there. You can see everything has been saved. So really not much of a difference between quitting and hiding or minimizing. 

So if this isn't working quite the same for you go to System Preferences and under General there's a checkbox here for Close windows when quitting an app. You want to make sure that is Unchecked. Also you want to have Unchecked Ask to keep changes when closing documents. So it automatically saves. Of course that may not work for some third party apps. Some third party apps may insist on asking if you want to save something before you leave the app.

So basically what I'm advocating here is to stop using the minimize button. Instead use Command H to hide an app when you want it out of the way or just Quit the app knowing you could relaunch it and it brings back the documents you were working on. Another thing you can do is use Mission Control to put different apps on different desktops.