OS X El Capitan: The Missing Manual

Exposé

Before Mission Control, there was Exposé. It was flexible, it was novel, it was a little confusing. A few years ago, Apple incorporated the main functions of Exposé into Mission Control—but Apple didn’t want to break all those Exposé fans’ hearts. So 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 (Figure 5-17, top) and one hid all windows in all programs so you could see the desktop (Figure 5-17, bottom).

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

Figure 5-17. Top: When you trigger one-app Exposé, you get a clear shot at any window in the current program (TextEdit, in this example). In the meantime, the rest of your screen attractively dims. In model Apple apps, like TextEdit and Preview, you even get a little row of icons at the bottom. They represent recently opened files, ready for clicking. Bottom: Trigger desktop Exposé when you need to duck back to the desktop for a quick administrative chore. Here’s your chance to find a file, throw something away, eject a disk, or whatever, without having to disturb your application windows. Tap the same key again ...