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Comment by evaneykelen | Hacker News Reader

My favorite shortcut is to restore minimized windows by pressing Command-Tab to display the application switcher, selecting the minimized app's icon, holding down Option (⌥), and then letting go of the Command key. The minimized window will be restored to its previous position and dimensions.

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When the "Minimize into the Application icon" feature appeared back in Snow Leopard, I was very much into this kind of thing. Yet over the years since, I've moved to mostly using Cmd-H to hide.

I tried the method you described and it seems to only bring back the frontmost window DragThing/Front and Center style.[1]

Odd.

[1]: https://hypercritical.co/front-and-center/

Cmd-H seems very underused to me, even by Mac power users. The reason might be that many recent Mac users are converts from Windows or Linux, where the concept of hiding an app doesn't exist. I love and extensively use this feature since I started using Macs about 25+ years ago. It's so much more convenient than minimizing an app's window(s) into the dock, and it's so nicely complemented by the app switcher.

Minimizing to the Dock felt similar to me, coming from XP, and didn't take up extra space in the Dock, which was visually pleasing. These days, my Dock is basically only key apps, 2 printer aliases and a few folders I access regularly.

A .weblocation might from time to time, but these are fairly infrequent.

You can also hide by holding option while clicking outside the window.

In case you have multiple minimized windows, another seemingly little known trick is pressing 1 while in the application switcher which will show all of the windows for the highlighted application.

Ctrl + Up arrow has a similar functionality where the user can use the arrow keys to select one of the multiple windows.

It is far easier imo to just use a dedicated window switcher which shows all open windows right away https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app/

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