Close Notifications with a Swipe

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Learn how to close notifications on the Mac with a swipe.

In macOS Big Sur, Apple made notifications a little more difficult to close. They did this by making the area you need to click on, the X,very small. You need to be more precise. Also, this X only shows when you hover over the notification. These changes from previous versions of macOS make closing notifications a little more difficult. Well, you can still swipe to close them if you have a trackpad. Just move your cursor over the notification, and swipe to the right. See how this works in this video on closing notifications.

Video Transcript (video also has closed captions):

In this video, I’m going to show you how you can easily swipe way notifications on the Mac. This can come in particularly handy if you’re using macOS Big Sur. When Apple introduced macOS Big Sur, they made the close button very small. So you have to be a little precise to close those notifications. Well, you can also just swipe those notifications away. Let’s see what I mean. Let’s go to my Mac.

Now, if we go on the upper right-hand corner, you’re going to see I have this notification here. Now, the way that I close these notifications is, by clicking on the ‘X’, but as I mentioned in the introduction, this little area here is very small. So you have to be a little precise with this. In previous versions of macOS, you had a little bit more wiggle room to close these notifications. Now, what I need to do is I need to move my cursor to the exact spot here to close this.

Well, there’s an easier way to close these notifications. Now this only works if you have a track pad, but to close this, all you really have to do now is just swipe to the right. Just move your cursor over into this area, it doesn’t really matter where it is on the notification, but from here all I really need to do is just swipe to the right, and it closes that notification. I no longer need to precisely place my cursor on that ‘X”. I just move my cursor over to the notification anywhere in that notification and swipe to the right.

So that’s how we can easily close our notifications. Again, this can come in particularly handy if you’re using macOS Big Sur. You no longer need to precisely click on that ‘X’. All you have to do is just swipe to the right. You do need to have a track pad for this to work.

So that’s how we can close our notifications on the Mac.

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