Earlier today I was lucky enough to recored an episode of Mac Voices with Chuck Joiner. We talked about Mac OS X Lion and its new features. During the discussion I shared my favorite Mission Control trick, which lets you quickly shuffle trough a stack of windows within a single app. Here’s how to do it.
- Invoke Mission Control. [1. By default, Mission Control is opened by a bottom-to-top, three-finger swipe. However, I’ve assigned it to a hot corner. Old habits die hard.]
- Identify the app with several windows open (in the image above, it’s Microsoft Word).
- Mouse over each window in the stack. You’ll notice a blue focus ring appears on the window the cursor is “touching.”
- Hit the Space Bar.
As you do, a preview of each window will move to the front. When you’ve found the one you’re after, hit Return to return to the desktop with that window front-and-center.
This has been possible in the Finder with Command-Tab (to bring the target application up front) and Command-tilde (to cycle through an app’s open windows), but I’d argue that the Mission Control method takes exactly the same amount of time, if not a little bit less. Try it and see.