In our next group of videos, we’re going to work with Finder windows. In this video, we’re going to look at how we can cycle through multiple windows. I want to cover this because you’ll probably open up multiple windows, and it’s easy to get confused. Well, let’s see how we can quickly cycle through our open windows on the Mac.

Let’s go to my Mac. Now, let’s go and open up some new windows. I’m going to use a keyboard shortcut command-N, and let’s go and open up a few more here. This one is going to be open to my recents here. Let’s open this one up to my applications. Then, let’s open up this one to my desktop.

We’ll just keep going here. Documents and downloads. I have about five or six windows open now. How do I go and navigate through these different windows? Well, one way is by clicking on the window in the background. We have recents back here. If I click on this, it’s going to bring it to the front. Pretty simple, but now the problem is, is I can’t see my other windows. Now, what do I do? Well, you could just go and move your windows around. I just click and drag in the title bar here or toolbar, and I click and drag them around. That’s one way of doing it.

Just clicking and moving the windows around, but that can get cumbersome. Especially if you have a lot of windows or looking for a window that is in the very back, you’re going to have to move a lot of Windows. Well, we have another way of doing this. If I go up to Window in the menu bar, I can see all of my open windows. If I want to go to my documents Window, I just select Documents, and it’s going to bring my documents Window to the front. I want to go to my downloads, I go to Window, and I can go to my downloads. Another way of doing this is through the dock. When I go down to my finder here, and I click and hold, what it’s going to do is it’s going to show me all of my open windows.
Now, I want to go to my applications, I select Applications, and I’m in my applications. I click and hold, then I want to go to my recents, I select Recents, and I’m in my recents. Now, we can also use keyboard shortcuts. When you use keyboard shortcuts, it’s called cycling through your windows, your open windows. If we go up to the window here in the menu bar, you will see we have an option for cycle through windows. What this will do is this will go to the next Window. Right now, I have my recents open. If I cycle through my windows, what it’s going to do is going to go to my applications Window. Then after that, it’s going to go to this Window here.

Now, let’s go up to window, and we’re going to go to cycle through windows, and now we can see that this window is open. I go up to Window again, cycle through windows, and now we can see that this window is open, but hardly ever do I use cycle through windows. What I like to use is the keyboard shortcut. You’re going to see under Window here; we have a keyboard shortcut. It’s the command and backward apostrophe key. This is in the upper left-hand corner of your keyboard. It’s the same key as the tilde key. I will usually call it the command-tilde key, but really, all you’re doing is holding down the command key and then the backward apostrophe key.

When you do this, it cycles through all of your open windows. Here are my recents. Here are my applications. Here are my downloads, and there are my documents. It’s just cycling through these windows. Then if you add the shift key in with a keyboard shortcut, it goes in the other direction. Those are the different ways we can cycle through our finder windows on the Mac.