Clearing the desktop of windows quickly is something that allows both Windows as macOS for many years, but in 2023 Apple introduced a new way of doing it that is really practical. From macOS Sonoma (macOS 14), a user can click anywhere free on the desktop to have everything minimized instantly. This feature is now available for Windows 10 and 11 thanks to a Microsoft engineer.
Scott Hanselmanvice president of technical personnel at CoreAI, GitHub and Windows at Microsoft, has released a small utility, PeekDesktopwhich displays in the system tray and replicates the operation of the feature ‘Show desktop’ of computers Mac. Once installed, the app runs in the background and works as expected.
‘PeekDesktop brings macOS Sonoma’s behavior of clicking the wallpaper to show the desktop to Windows 10 and 11. Click an empty area in the background to minimize open windows, interact with desktop icons without accidental activations, then restore everything by clicking on an app, the taskbar, or the wallpaper again‘, writes Hanselman on the app’s website.
Although the application is very minimalist and It does not have its own graphical interfaceit does allow you to choose between several options. You can select the effectbetween minimizing windows with an animation similar to that of macOS or doing it in the classic Windows ‘Show desktop’ way, and switch from one-click to double-click mode. This last option helps avoid accidental activations of the function.
It should be noted that it does not just minimize applications. If you click on the desktop again, PeekDesktop restores all minimized windows to their corresponding position. It is not the only way to achieve this action in Windows, which has two native ways to do it, but yes the most practical.
To show the desktop in Windows you can click in the right corner of the taskbarin the small strip that remains after the notifications icon, but the space is so small that the click often fails. And it becomes more complicated if two monitors are used.
Alternatively, you can use the keyboard shortcut Windows + Dmore efficient, but not as convenient as clicking with the mouse you probably already have in your hand.