How to Enable the App Exposé Swipe Gesture on Mac

Mission Control shows every window from every app — often far too many. App Exposé shows only the windows of the app you're in, which is usually the one you actually want. Apple ships the gesture disabled, so most Mac users never see it. Turning it on takes ten seconds.

Turn on App Exposé

1. Open System Settings → Trackpad.
2. Select the More Gestures tab.
3. Set App Exposé to Swipe Down with Three Fingers (or Swipe Down with Four Fingers — see below).

Same path on macOS 13 Ventura, 14 Sonoma, and 15 Sequoia. To undo, set the menu back to Off.

Now open an app with several windows and swipe down. Every window of that app — including minimized ones, shown smaller below the rest — fans out with a label. Click the one you want, or swipe up (or press Esc) to back out without switching. Document-based apps like Pages and TextEdit also show a row of recent documents along the bottom, so App Exposé doubles as a quick reopen menu.

Where it earns its place: six Finder windows scattered across two displays, a dozen Safari windows after a research session, or the Preview window you minimized an hour ago and can't find. Mission Control would show you all of those plus everything else; App Exposé filters to the one app you care about, which makes the pick faster every time.

Three fingers or four?

The dropdown offers both, and macOS keeps App Exposé and Mission Control on the same finger count — pick three for one and the other follows, so swipe up is always "zoom out to everything" and swipe down is "zoom in on this app."

• Three fingers is the lighter, faster gesture — but it conflicts with three-finger drag (Accessibility → Pointer Control → Trackpad Options). If you use three-finger drag, the swipe won't fire; choose four fingers instead.
• Four fingers works regardless of drag settings and is harder to trigger by accident. It's the safe default.

Whichever you pick, the up/down pair is worth drilling for a day: down for "show me this app," up for "show me everything." Once it's automatic, you stop hunting through overlapping windows entirely.

The keyboard and Dock versions

The same view has two other entrances, useful when your hands are on the keyboard or a mouse:

• Ctrl + Down Arrow — the "Application windows" shortcut, on by default. Check or change it under System Settings → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts → Mission Control.
• Force click a Dock icon — press deeply on a running app's Dock icon (Force Touch trackpads) to fan out its windows without switching to it first.

Pair App Exposé with Cmd + ` (backtick), which cycles through the current app's windows one at a time without any overview. Cycling is faster for two or three windows; App Exposé wins when there are six Finder windows and you need to see them to pick.

If the swipe does nothing

Three quick checks: the App Exposé menu is actually set (it resets to Off if trackpad settings are restored); three-finger drag isn't stealing the gesture; and you're swiping with fingers spread slightly apart — a cramped three-finger swipe often reads as two. If Mission Control gestures are dead too, the Dock process (which draws both views) may be stuck; log out and back in, or restart.

One more source of confusion: App Exposé only shows windows of the frontmost app. If you swipe down on the desktop with Finder active, you get Finder's windows — which can look like "nothing happened" if none are open. Click into the app whose windows you want first, then swipe.