OS X’s Exposé feature has over the years become one of those little pieces of functionality that I simply can’t live without. F9, F10, and F11 are a part of my everyday workflow now, and they’re the feature I miss the most when I have to use Windows for some reason.
I discovered this particular behavior by accident—I haven’t seen it any of the documentation, but perhaps I just haven’t looked closely enough. While using F11 to reveal the desktop is very handy, often I need to move a file from the desktop to another location. I could just switch to the Finder and choose to Hide Others, but that’s more steps than I want to deal with. However, if you hit F11 and then click on the Finder icon in the Dock, or switch to the Finder via command-tab, the rest of the windows will stay hidden. Even better, if you click on the Finder icon in the Dock, and there are no Finder windows currently open, it will open one for you and keep the rest of the windows hidden. As far as I can tell, this only works for the Finder. Switching to any other application will cause all the windows to spring back into place.
This is probably common knowledge, but I still find it incredibly useful when I need to file a document away deep within my cavernous hard disk. That’s right, cavernous. It’s like an echo chamber in there.
thanks for the tip! i always wondered how i can go about opening up finder without springing all of the application windows into view. kudos!
Another cool trick is to start dragging a file you want to drop into some hidden window, then activate expose hover over the window you want to drop into until that window blinks and comes foreward and then release to drop the file.
Nice tip. I haven't internalized expose to the point I use it as often a I should (it doesn't help that I'm chained to a PC at work for a majority of the day). Maybe this tip will help.
What I do in that case is switch to the finder and hit CMD-Option-H. It hides everything but the finder. To me, that seems quicker.
Also, you can cmd-option-click a dock icon to hide everything but the app you just clicked... neat, huh?