If you are one of those people who live in clutter, even your Mac desktop could be full of windows and apps open on top of each other. In this case, there are two solutions: buy a Mac with a huge screen (like the brand new 15″ Macbook Air M2), or learn how to hide apps from the desktop of your device.
Before explaining how to hide apps on mac and macbookHowever, we must make a clarification: “hiding” a software does not mean closing it, but simply closing its window on the desktop. In other words, the app will continue running in the background until you close it. If you want to save some RAM and CPU and if you haven’t used an app for a while, you can close it instead of hiding it: Your Mac’s performance will thank you.
If, on the other hand, you just want to tidy up your Desktop, we suggest you try a hide all apps on the desktop except the active one. By “active” app we mean the one you’re working on, i.e. the last one you clicked on with the mouse or trackpad. To hide the other apps, you will therefore have to touch the app you are interested in leaving open and then go to the Mac menu bar.
Here, click on the software name (for example Pages), which should be there immediately to the right of the Apple icon. A drop-down menu will open, which you will need to scroll down until you find “Hide others”. The command allows you to hide all apps other than the selected one. Click it and your Desktop will suddenly be much tidier!
If you wish instead show all active apps on the desktop, perhaps to switch from one to the other on the fly, just below “Hide others” you will find the command “Show all”. Finally, we remind you that you can hide all tabs except the active one with the keyboard shortcut Command + Shift + H. If you want, then, you can take a look at our guide on mirroring the Mac screen.