In this lesson for macOS, I look at how to hide your open applications as well as how to hide all your other open applications and keep your frontmost application visible. See the different ways to hide your open applications in this lesson for the Mac.
Video Transcript (video also has closed captions):
Introduction: Now, let’s take a look at how you can hide our open applications. Let’s go to my Mac. Let’s first go and open up my contacts and then let’s go and open up Safari.
Hiding an Open Application: Now, what I want to do is I want to go back to my contacts, but what I also want to do is I want to hide Safari. I don’t want to quit out of it, but I would like to hide it. I don’t want to have any distractions. To hide an application, you go up to your menu bar and then under the application name. I’m in Safari here, you’re going to see hide, and of course, my favorite way is to use command-H. This works on every app, so I select it, and now I can see my contacts. Safari is still open. We can still see the black dot below the icon in the doc. If you recall, this is how we can see that an app is open. If it has a black dot, it is open, but what it is is it’s also hidden. To bring Safari back up to the front or to open it back up or unhide it, we click on it in the doc, and it brings it back to the front. Now, we can also hide other apps. You’re going to notice when I go under Safari, in addition to hiding Safari, I can also hide others.
Hiding Other Applications: I select this, and now all of my other apps are hidden. If I were to move this one too, remember we had contacts open. I moved this window. Contacts is no longer there. It is still open. We can see the black dot here. It is just hidden. I click on it, brings it to the front. Now, where this can come in handy is if you have a lot of windows or a lot of apps open. Let’s go and open up the calendar app and now let’s go and open up a Finder window. Now, what I want to do is I want to focus on my Calendar, so I’m going to bring my Calendar to the front. Let’s put it in the center here. I don’t want to have any other distractions. I can still see my Finder window. What I want to do is I want to hide all of my other apps. To do that, all you have to do is go up under Calendar, and then you’re going to see Hide others, and then I select this, and now I can only see my Calendar. Again, the other apps are not closed. They’re still open. They’re just hidden.
So that’s how we hide and why we would want to hide apps on the Mac.
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