How to Hide Apps Instantly on Mac (Cmd-H and Friends)

The fastest way to clear your screen on a Mac isn't minimizing — it's hiding. Cmd-H makes the front app vanish instantly, every window at once, and one more shortcut brings it back exactly as it was. Here's the whole family of hide shortcuts and why they beat the yellow button.

The two shortcuts

• Cmd + H — hide the front app. Every window it owns disappears in one frame; no animation, nothing lands in the Dock.
• Cmd + Option + H — hide everything else. The front app stays; every other app's windows vanish. Instant focus mode.

Combine them: press Cmd + Option + H and then Cmd + H, and you're looking at a completely empty desktop — two keystrokes, fully reversible, and every window comes back exactly where it was.

Bringing hidden apps back

A hidden app is still running, still in the Dock, still in the Cmd-Tab switcher. Any of these restores it, with all its windows exactly where they were:

• Cmd-Tab to it — switching to a hidden app unhides it automatically.
• Click its Dock icon.
• Click it in the menu bar's app menu — the app's own menu shows Show All to unhide every hidden app at once.

That last one is worth remembering: any app's leftmost menu (Safari, Finder, etc.) contains Hide Safari, Hide Others, and Show All — the menu equivalents of everything on this page.

Hide vs minimize: why Cmd-H usually wins

• Scope. Minimizing (Cmd + M) handles one window; hiding takes the whole app in one go.
• Speed back. A minimized window won't return via Cmd-Tab — you have to fish its thumbnail out of the Dock (or Option-release in the switcher). A hidden app snaps back with a plain Cmd-Tab.
• Dock clutter. Minimized windows pile up as thumbnails on the Dock's right side. Hidden apps add nothing.
• When minimize wins: you want one window of an app out of the way while keeping its siblings visible. Hiding can't do that.

Two bonus moves in the same spirit: Option + click on another app's window switches to it and hides the app you left; Cmd + Option + click a Dock icon switches to that app and hides all others.

See which apps are hidden

Hidden apps look identical to merely running ones in the Dock, which gets confusing by mid-afternoon. One hidden preference fixes that by dimming their icons:

# make hidden apps translucent in the Dock
defaults write com.apple.dock showhidden -bool true
killall Dock

# undo
defaults delete com.apple.dock showhidden
killall Dock

Works on Ventura, Sonoma, and Sequoia. Now a glance at the Dock tells you what's hidden versus merely open.

Where hiding fits in a real workflow

Hiding is visual, not mechanical: a hidden app keeps doing whatever it was doing. Downloads finish, exports render, music plays on, and Dock badge counts keep updating, so you're not flying blind. That makes Cmd-H safe in a way that quitting isn't — you're clearing sightlines, not stopping work. (macOS may let a fully idle hidden app nap to save power, but anything active carries on.)

Three habits that make it stick:

• The screen-share sweep: Cmd + Option + H before presenting or taking a screenshot leaves only the app you mean to show.
• The rabbit-hole guard: hide Slack and Mail after each check instead of quitting them — they stay silent and out of sight until you deliberately Tab back.
• The Finder caveat: hiding Finder hides its windows, but your desktop icons stay visible — they belong to the desktop layer, not to a window. Hiding desktop clutter is a different tool entirely.

Just want to see the desktop?

If the goal is glancing at your desktop rather than clearing apps, don't hide anything — use the show desktop gesture or key instead: all the ways to show the desktop on a Mac.