10.4: A couple of Exposé tips

Mar 16, '07 07:30:02AM

Contributed by: mike666

Hopefully by this time, everyone knows how Exposé can be used to cut through window clutter and navigate the tons of windows you might have open. What I've never seen outlined is how it can help in a couple of problem cases.

The first helpful thing I've noticed F10 can do is simply gather the windows for an app together. Apple just touts it for letting you switch between windows in the frontmost app, but it can do more than that. Say you want all your Finder windows to come forward so you can copy files between them. You could click the Finder's icon in the dock, or just click on one window to bring it forward, and then double-tap F10. When you do, all Finder windows will move to the front.

The second Exposé trick is for dealing with some apps (notably Disk Warrior and Carbon Copy Cloner) that don't like to bring their windows to the front if you click on them, or switch to them while they're busy. There are two ways around this: First, use All Windows (F9) and click on the hidden window there and it will come forward (for DiskWarrior, be sure to click specifically on the progress pane in the miniature window or it will be hidden by the main window when it comes forward). Second, if part of the window is visible, click on it -- even though it doesn't show it, Exposé and the App Switcher will now see that app as frontmost. So just do a quick double-tap on F10 (or whatever you've assigned Application Windows to) and the window will come forward.

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