Unminimize Windows on OS X

2008/04/26

There’s a tip over on lifehacker that shows how to open a new window for an application that has no windows currently open by cmd-tabbing to it and then holding down the option key before releasing command.

This didn’t seem like that great of a tip to me at first, because cmd-N brings up a new window in just about any application that this will work for. Then I noticed the first comment where the poster noted that holding option down will also unminimize any minimized windows for that application. Something that I didn’t previously know how to do in native OSX after many google searches.

The native ways of using the keyboard to get it unminimized that I knew of were either kludgy (ctrl-F3 to select the dock and then using the arrows to find the minimized app and hitting return), or required an external app like Witch.

I’ve gotten into the habit of hiding windows (cmd-H) rather than minimizing, but this might get me to start using minimize again.

There are 6 comments in this article:

  1. 2008/11/29Johnny say:

    Awesome.

  2. 2009/02/2James say:

    Unless I’m doing something wrong, this only works if the minimized window is the only window. For example, if you have one minimized window and one that is not the app does not un-minimize.

  3. 2009/02/3tednaleid say:

    @James, you’re right, if you have multiple windows of the same app open and some are minimized, this trick doesn’t seem to work.

    I tend to use a lot of tabbed interfaces (firefox, terminal, different code editing IDEs etc), so that doesn’t happen that often for me.

    The best alternative I’ve found is to use hide (cmd-H) rather than minimize if you run into that kind of problem. Then you can just cmd-tab back to the app and all windows will pop up.

    Also, if you really get into this kind of thing, I’d check out witch an inexpensive taskswitcher that’s aware of individual app windows (and unminimizes).

  4. 2010/09/16andxyz say:

    I’ve visited this article on two separate occasions, google always finds it for me. I can never seem to get the hang of hitting the option key after the command key. I’ve started using witch, as I do usually have multiple firefox/chrome windows open, with a lot of tabs each. I hate having to read the text that witch provides. I almost want to to override the command key, and the alt key with witch. So that I can run witch in two different modes: one heavy on text, and one just icons. oh, well, can’t configure it all.

  5. 2010/09/16tednaleid say:

    @andxyz I wrote this before snow leopard came out. There’s also the ability in 10.6 for those options that have multiple minimized windows to do cmd-tab and then hit 1 (while still holding command) to be able to pick from the windows to maximize.

  6. 2011/07/26Adrian say:

    great tip, thanx. Too bad Apple hasn’t fixed this stupidity yet

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