Exposé Hidden Secrets: Keyboard Controls

Posted by Conner Downey on 06/10/07 in Tips & Tricks

Tips and Tricks While you may be a big fan of Exposé, sometimes there may be some functions you wish were enabled. Whether you use a button on your mouse, power corners, or a key on your keyboard, it still could be a bit more functional. One thing that many people wish for in Exposé is keyboard controls, but they actually do exist.

The reason they are hard to find, is that there isn’t a place where you can remap the keys, so many people don’t notice them. Lucky enough, these tips are sometimes featured on Mac sites, so people can find out about them. Once you start Exposé, your two options are: show all windows, or show all windows within a certain application. Whichever one you choose, hit Tab, and you can change which application is showing it’s windows. Now, you can use the arrow keys to cycle through. When you are done, hit enter or space to choose that window. If you decided that you didn’t want to open Exposé, hit escape to go with the window you had chosen at the start. With these tricks, you may find that Exposé becomes much more useful. For a list of all the available controls, see below.

Exposé Controls:

• F9 - Show windows for all apps
• F10 - Show windows for one app
• Tab - Cycle through applications and their windows
• Shift-Tab - Go to the previous application
• Arrow Keys - Move between windows in Exposé
• Spacebar or Enter - Bring selected window to the front
• Esc - Leave Exposé, ignoring window selection

I hope this comes in handy and you’ve find new life in Exposé.

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11 Comment(s)

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Marvin Sum said on

June 10th, 2007 at 9:57 am

Expose is cool, but as a more demanding user, I find it faster to just click on the icons in the dock to bring up the associated application.

F10 - Show windows for one app is really useful though.

Rory said on

June 10th, 2007 at 2:35 pm

>>I find it faster to just click on the icons in the dock to bring up the associated application

I prefer Command-Tab so I’m not having to mouse to the dock everytime I want to jump to an open app.

Taras Brizitsky said on

June 10th, 2007 at 3:18 pm

Thanks! I didn’t know about some of this functionality before

Ex2bot said on

June 10th, 2007 at 4:14 pm

Another important keypress F11 clears all windows to show the Desktop. I think I use that one most of all.

bot

Dakota said on

June 10th, 2007 at 5:53 pm

>>The reason they are hard to find, is that there isn’t a place where you can remap the keys

Actually, in Tiger you can remap or completely disable the Expose keys. In System Preferences, under the Dashboard and Expose control panel, you can change the control keys and corners, or just disable them all.

Mason said on

June 11th, 2007 at 9:12 am

By holding down the ’shift’ key with the F9 or F10 key, you can achieve a cool slow motion effect.

ayayay said on

August 26th, 2007 at 12:36 pm

I’ve never understood the enthusiasm for that “cool slow motion effect.” Major waste of some coder’s time. They should have saved that key combination for something useful.

Ryan P said on

October 31st, 2007 at 2:16 am

Can somebody please tell me how to flip through a set of
windows in os 10.4.10
in my old version i should just hold down the apple and the § key (the key next to z) and it should flip, but with this new version that shortcut dont work anymore.

please help

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Dan said on

December 14th, 2007 at 6:20 am

To cycle through the windows in the current frontmost application, use Cmd-` (Backtick, to right of left-hand shift key). This can also be remapped back to Cmd-§ in System Preferences -> Keyboard & Mouse -> Keyboard Shortcuts -> Keyboard Navigation

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Ryan P said on

December 14th, 2007 at 6:30 am

Thanks it works perfectly!

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rapunga said on

August 4th, 2008 at 11:07 pm

i already new this lying shit so u queers stop playin around say sumen different OR ELSE

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