One action to clear the screen. One action to bring it all back.

Comparison

Every way to minimize windows on macOS

macOS offers several built-in ways to push windows out of the way. Each has trade-offs:

⌘H (Hide Application) hides the current app’s windows. Other apps remain visible. You cannot hide several apps at once without switching to each one and pressing ⌘H separately. Hidden windows reappear when you click the app’s Dock icon, but there is no single “restore all” action.

⌥⌘M (Minimize All Windows) minimizes all windows of the frontmost app into the Dock. Again, it only affects one app at a time. Restoring means clicking each minimized window individually in the Dock.

Hot Corners → Desktop pushes all windows aside to show the desktop. Move your mouse to a corner, and windows scatter. But the effect ends as soon as you click any window or interact with the desktop. There is no persistent “cleared” state.

Fn F11 (Show Desktop) works like the Hot Corner trigger but via keyboard. Same limitation: it reverses on interaction.

WindowShelf Show Desktop takes a different approach. It records the signature (app + title) of every non-minimized window, then minimizes them all. The sidebar still lists every window, dimmed. Trigger Show Desktop again and WindowShelf restores every recorded window to its original position. This is the only method that offers a true toggle with state memory across all apps.

Use cases for clearing the screen

Quick desktop access. You need to grab a file from the desktop or check a widget. Show Desktop clears the screen, you do your thing, and one trigger later everything is exactly as it was.

Screen sharing. Before sharing your screen in a meeting, Show Desktop hides all windows so colleagues don’t see your 15 open tabs. When the meeting ends, restore everything without manually reopening.

Context switch. You finished the morning sprint and want to start a fresh afternoon session. Show Desktop clears the old workspace. Open the windows you need for the next task and collapse everything else.

Visual reset. Sometimes a clean screen just helps you think. WindowShelf’s Show Desktop gives you that blank slate without losing any work. One shortcut to clear, one to restore. No windows to close and reopen.

How Show Desktop remembers your layout

When you trigger Show Desktop, WindowShelf does more than just minimize everything. It stores the window signature (a combination of bundle identifier and window title) for every non-minimized window at that moment. This list is saved internally, so even if you open new windows after clearing the screen, the restore action brings back exactly the windows that were visible before.

The restore process iterates through the saved signatures, finds the matching windows in the current window list, and un-minimizes each one. If a window was closed in the meantime, it is simply skipped — no error, no popup. Windows that were already minimized before Show Desktop are left untouched, since they were not part of the “visible” set.

This signature-based approach is more reliable than tracking window IDs alone, because macOS can recycle window IDs when apps close and reopen windows. By matching on app identity plus title, WindowShelf correctly restores windows even if their underlying IDs have changed.

The entire mechanism runs on the same background queue that powers sidebar refresh, so the restore happens in under a second regardless of how many windows you have.

Selective restore. You do not have to restore everything at once. After Show Desktop, you can expand individual categories in the sidebar to bring back just the windows you need. Restore your browser and editor, but leave email and chat minimized. This turns Show Desktop from a blunt “all-or-nothing” tool into a flexible “clear and selectively restart” workflow.

Questions & answers