Hide what distracts. Show what matters.

Why this beats ⌘H

Hide, minimize, or close: knowing the difference

macOS provides three ways to remove a window from view. Each behaves differently, and choosing the right one matters for your workflow:

⌘H (Hide). Hides all windows of the current app. The app stays running, and windows reappear when you click its Dock icon. But there is no visual indicator that windows are hidden — the Dock icon looks the same. You can easily forget what you’ve hidden.

⌘M (Minimize). Minimizes the front window into the Dock shelf. The window thumbnail appears at the right end of the Dock (or bottom, if your Dock is vertical). Restoring requires clicking that tiny thumbnail. Minimized windows pile up, making the Dock crowded.

⌘W (Close). Closes the window entirely. The document or tab is gone. You must reopen it from the app’s File menu or recently-closed list. This is permanent removal, not hiding.

WindowShelf adds a fourth approach: collapse a category. All windows in that group are minimized at once. They appear dimmed in the sidebar, still listed, still one click away from restoring. You always see what is hidden and can restore the entire group with one click on the expand chevron.

A real workflow: hide, focus, restore

Say you have 18 windows open: email, Slack, three browser tabs, an IDE with two panes, Figma, Terminal, Notes, and several miscellaneous windows. You need to focus on coding for the next hour.

Step 1: Collapse everything except code. In the sidebar, collapse the email category, the Slack category, and the browser category. Their windows minimize to the Dock. Only your IDE and Terminal remain visible.

Step 2: Tile your coding windows. Right-click your IDE’s shelf → Tile All. The IDE takes the left two-thirds of the screen, Terminal takes the right third.

Step 3: Work undistracted. No taskbar notifications pull your attention. The sidebar shows your coding windows at the top, with collapsed groups grayed out below. If you need to check one email, expand the mail category, read it, and collapse again.

Step 4: Restore when done. Expand all collapsed categories. Every window comes back to its previous position. Your 18-window workspace is exactly as it was before your focus session.

The entire hide-and-restore cycle takes two clicks. Compare that to manually ⌘H-ing five apps and then hunting through the Dock to bring each one back.

Why hidden windows still belong in your sidebar

When you hide or minimize windows with macOS shortcuts, they vanish from the screen. The only way to find them is to go through the Dock: hover each app icon to see if it has hidden windows, or scan the miniature thumbnails at the Dock’s far end for minimized ones. With 10+ apps open, this is a scavenger hunt.

WindowShelf’s sidebar never removes windows from the list just because they are hidden or minimized. Instead, minimized windows appear dimmed in the sidebar. You can see at a glance exactly which windows are visible and which are tucked away. No guessing, no Dock hunting.

This matters because hiding windows is supposed to reduce clutter, not create confusion. If you hide five apps to focus on coding, you should be able to find any of those hidden windows in one click when you need them. The sidebar provides that: a permanent, always-visible inventory of every window on your system, regardless of its visible/hidden/minimized state.

And because the sidebar groups windows by category (or custom shelf), you don’t just see a flat list of 25 dimmed windows. You see “Slack: dimmed,” “Mail: dimmed,” “VS Code: active” — organized context that tells you instantly what is hidden and where to find it.

Questions & answers