Minwoo’s Right Brain Archive

To Minimize or To Hide… That is the question (for Mac users). Most people who like to use mouse, I think sticks to Minimize to Dock, then click on the corresponding icon on dock to restore the minimized window. Then there are people like me, who try to stay away from using mouse unless I’m browsing. People like us, usually hide the current application (and all its windows) which you can get back by pressing Cmd-tab. Although there are subtle differences in these semantics, when I first switched to Mac, I found it weird that OS X offers two ways to rid of current window. And if you minimized the window, cmd-tab’ing through open application does not restore the minimized window. It’s pretty hard to imagine a rationale behind this annoyance.

Then today, while I was reading Lifehacker article about a freeware that provides just this functionality (enable cmd-tab to minimized window), I found out that you CAN indeed restore minimized window (without installing the mentioned freeware)

1. Ctrl-F3 which put focus on the Dock. Bah. This method sucks as you need to use arrow key to navigate through the dock icons. It’s good in case you absolutely have to press something on the dock… almost never, for me.
2. Cmd-tab then press Option as you release Cmd key. Good ‘ol Option key. There are so many hidden goodies on Mac apps associates with the Option. Awesome!

With that said, I’ll probably stick with hiding apps. I always keep my Dock hidden anyway.