. Hiding Programs the Old-Fashioned Way When it comes to getting windows out of your way, nothing can touch Exposé and Spaces for speed and entertainment value. | . Hiding Programs the Old-Fashioned Way When it comes to getting windows out of your way nothing can touch Expose and Spaces for speed and entertainment value. Once you ve mastered those features the traditional rituals of hiding windows will seem charmingly quaint. When I was your age you ll tell your grandchildren we used to have to hold down the Option key to hide windows But you know the drill at software companies They addeth but they never taketh away. All of the old techniques are still around for the benefit of Mac fans who use them by force of habit. . Hiding the Program You re Using For the purposes of this discussion when a program is hidden all of its windows tool palettes and button bars disappear. You can bring them back only by bringing the program to the front again by clicking its Dock icon again for example . If your aim is to hide only the program you re currently using Mac OS X offers a whole raft of approaches to the same problem. Many of them involve the Option key as listed here Option-click any visible portion of the desktop. The program you were in vanishes along with all of its windows. Option-click any other program s icon on the open that program or bring all of its windows to the front and hide all the windows of the one you were using. Option-click any visible portion of another program s again you switch programs hiding the one you were using at the time. From the Application menu choose Hide iPhoto or whatever the program is . The Application menu is the boldfaced menu that bears the program s name. When you ve highlighted a Dock icon by pressing -Tab to rotate through the running programs press the letter H key. The program hides itself instantly. Leave the key down the whole time and after pressing the H press Tab again to move on to the next program. If you release the keys while stopped on the program instead you ll bring it forward rather than hiding it. Press -H. This may be the easiest and most .
