Mac OS X Lion: The Missing Manual

Exposé

Before Mission Control, there was Exposé. It was flexible, it was novel, it was a little confusing. In Lion, Apple incorporated the main functions of Exposé into Mission Control—but Apple didn’t want to break all those Exposé fans’ hearts. So in Lion, Exposé is still there, for the benefit of old-timers who don’t like change.

Well, it’s mostly there. There used to be three different Exposé modes. One showed you miniatures of all windows in all programs; one showed you miniatures of all windows in just one program; and one hid all windows in all programs so you could see the desktop.

In Lion, only the second and third Exposé functions still exist. (The first one—showing all windows in all programs—is what Mission Control is for.)

TROUBLESHOOTING MOMENT: A Tedious Side Note about the Aluminum Apple Keyboards

In the beginning, you could trigger the three Exposé modes described on these pages with three simple keystrokes: F9, F10, and F11.

Then Apple’s aluminum keyboards and laptops came along. On these, Apple devoted the F3 key to Exposé functions—and reassigned the F9, F10, and F11 keys to speaker-volume control!

You can make them operate as in the days of yore—by adding the Fn key. That is: Fn-F9 for Mission Control, Fn-F10 for one-app Exposé, and Fn-F11 for desktop Exposé. (Details on the Fn key appear on The Macintosh Keyboard.)

So here’s the point: On modern Macs, you have a choice ...