Cycle through your Open Finder Windows

In this video, I’m going to show you how you can easily cycle through your open windows on the Mac. As you most likely know what can happen as you use your Mac is you can have a lot of windows open. Well, how can we easily select which window we want to bring to the front? Which window do we want to work with? So, this is what I’m going to take a look at in this video.

Now, before we get started, I just want to mention that I am showing you this in macOS Mojave. But the same techniques work across all versions of macOS. You could be using macOS High Sierra all the way up to macOS Monterey. You can still use these same techniques. So let’s see how we can cycle through multiple windows on them. Let’s go to my Mac.

Now let’s go and open up some new windows. I’m going to use a keyboard shortcut, command N, and let’s just go and open up a few more here. This one is going to be open to my Recent Files. Let’s open this one up to my Applications, and let’s open up this one to my Desktop. We’ll just keep going here. Documents and downloads.

So I have about five or six windows open. Now, how do I go and navigate through these different windows? Well, one way is by clicking on the window in the background. So we have Recents back here. If I click on this, it’s gonna bring it to the front, pretty simple.

But now the problem is, is I can’t see my other windows. So now what do I do? Well, we could just go and move your windows around. I just click and drag in the title bar here or toolbar and I click and drag them around. So that’s one way of doing it, just clicking and moving the windows around, but that can get kind of cumbersome, especially if you have a lot of windows or you’re looking for a window that is in the very back, you’re going to have to move a lot of windows.

Well, we have another way of doing this. If I go up to Window in the menu bar, I can see all of my open windows. So if I wanted to go to my Documents window, I just select Documents and it’s going to bring my Documents window to the front. I want to go to my Downloads, I go to Window and I can go to my Downloads.

Another way of doing this as through the Dock. When I go down to my Finder here and I click and hold, what it’s going to do is it’s going to show me all of my open windows. So now I want to go to my Applications. I just select Applications, and I’m in my Applications. I click and hold and I want to go my Recents, I select Recents. And now I’m in my Recents.

Now we can also use keyboard shortcuts. When you use keyboard shortcuts, it’s called cycling through your windows, your open windows. If we go up to window here in the menu bar, you’re going to see, we have an option for Cycle Through Windows. What this will do is this will go to the next window. So right now I my Recents open. If I cycled through my windows, what it’s going to do is it’s going to go to my Applications window. Then after that, it’s going to go to this window here. So now let’s go up to Window and we’re going to go to Cycle Through Windows. And now we can see that this window is open. I go up to Window again, Cycle Through Windows, and now I can see that this window. But hardly ever do I use Cycle Through Windows. What I like to use is the keyboard shortcut. You’re going to see under Window here, we have a keyboard shortcut. It’s the command and backwards apostrophe key. This is in the upper left hand corner of your keyboard. It’s the same key as the tilde key. So what I will usually do is call it the command tilde key, but really all you’re doing is holding down the command key, and then the backwards apostrophe key. When you do, it cycles through all of your open windows. Here’s my Recents, there’s my Applications. There’s my Downloads. And there’s my Documents. So it’s just cycling through these windows. And then if you add the shift key in with our keyboard shortcut, it goes in the other direction.

So those are the different ways we can cycle through our Finder windows on the Mac. We can click on a Window title bar to bring it to the front. We can go up under Window in the menu bar, and then we can also click and hold on the Finder icon in the Dock and select our window. And then my favorite way is through the keyboard shortcut command tilde.

So that’s how you can cycle through your different windows on the Mac.