Learn how to hide all the windows and show your Desktop by using Hot Corners on your Mac.
Did you know you could hide all your open windows to show your Mac’s Desktop just my moving your cursor to a corner on your display? This is something I use countless times a day. When I need a file on my Desktop, I move my cursor to the lower left corner of my display. All my windows are hidden or moved out of the ay and I can see my Desktop. See how this works in this video for the Mac.
Video Transcript (video also has closed captions):
In this video, I’m going to show you how I can use Hot Corners to move all of your windows out of the way and show your Desktop. This makes it really easy to access any file or folder that you have on your Desktop, even if you have a lot of windows open on your Mac. Now I’m going to show you how this works using macOS Catalina, but it does work across the different macOS versions, including macOS Mojave. MacOS High Sierra. macOS Big Sur, and even macOS Monterey. So if you’re using a different macOS version than what I am showing you with here, just follow the same basic steps and you’ll be able to use Hot Corners. This is one of my favorite tips and it’s something that I use every day on my Mac. Let’s see how we use Hot Corners on the Mac. Let’s go to my Mac.
Now, if we look at my Mac here, you’re going to see I have several windows open. I have my Calendar here, I also have Safari here, and then I have several Finder windows. But also what you can’t see because I have all of these windows open here, is I have a folder on my Desktop called WIP for Work In Process. What I would like to do is I would like to access a file in that folder that’s on my Desktop. Now, in order to do that, what I would need to do is I would need to move some of these windows around. I would need to move my Calendar window here, and now I need to move my Finder window, and then I can see my Work In Process.
Well, there’s an easier way of doing this without moving all of these individual windows around. What we can do is we can set up a Hot Corner to show our Desktop. When we set this up, what we’re able to do is just move our cursor here into one of the four corners of our display. And it’s going to move all of the windows on our Mac and show our Desktop so we can easily access anything on our desktop.
So, how do we do that? Well, Hot Corners is located in your System Preferences. So now what I’m going to do is I’m going to go up to the Apple menu and then we’re going to go to System Preferences. From here, what we need to do is we need to go to Mission Control. Under Mission Control, you’re going to see an option for Hot Corners. Now when I select this, what we’re going to be able to do is select what we want to happen with our Mac when we put our cursor into a corner. So let’s go ahead and select this and see how this works. We have a sheet that drops down and now you can see my four corners here. So now what I’m able to do is I’m able to select what I want to happen with my Mac when I move my cursor into each one of these four corners.
What I want to do is I want to show the Desktop when I move my cursor in the lower left hand corner. So I’m going to go to my lower left hand corner. Here we go over to the left and we just select from the drop down what we want our Mac to do. In my case, I want it to go to the Desktop or show the Desktop. So now I just select this, I click on okay, and now it’s going to move my windows again.
I’m just going to move my System Preferences over top of my Work In process. Let’s go and move my Finder here, and let’s go with our Calendar. So again, I have multiple windows covering up my Desktop. I want to go to my Desktop. Well, instead of moving these windows around individually, now all I need to do is just go down to the lower left-hand corner, and when I put my cursor down in the very corner of it, watch what happens. All of the windows move.
And now what I’m able to do as I’m able to go to my Work In Process, I can double click on it. I can go and open up that file. I want all of my windows to come back, well all I need to do is just move my cursor in the lower left hand corner again, and they all come back.
Let’s go move this file here on top of my Desktop. I’m going to move it out of this folder here. So now what I do is I just click and drag and we’re going to place it over here. So now it is on my Desktop. I want to see that file. How do we do that? We just go to the lower left hand corner, and you’re going to see I have my estimate. I want to move it back into my Work In Process. All I have to do is just click and drag. Now. It is in my Work In Process here. I want to show all of my windows again. I go to the lower left hand corner and I can see all of my windows.
So that’s how we can easily see our Desktop or the files and folders on our Desktop when we use Hot Corners. All we need to do is just go to System Preferences, Mission Control, and then we set up our Hot Corners.
So that’s how we can easily show our Desktop or the files and folders on our Desktop using Hot Corners on the Mac.