macOS comes with plenty of gestures for the magic trackpad/magic mouse. Some of them are enabled by default, some of them you can enable in your System Preference and others are simply hidden.
Just like this secret scroll gesture that you can enable to easily reveal all of an an app’s windows.
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What does this secret scroll gesture do?
Let’s say you have multiple Firefox windows open ( not tabs ). You have one in focus and the rest of them are minimized.
When you want to open one of the minimized window, you’ll need to click-and-hold on the Firefox icon in the Dock untill you’ll get a list of all the open windows.
When you enable this gesture, you can do an upward two-finger swipe over the Firefox icon and you’ll get a nice view of all your open windows. Just like in the screenshot above ( or below ).
How to enable the scroll gesture?
1. Open the terminal
2. Run defaults write com.apple.dock scroll-to-open -bool true; killall Dock
That’s it.Now, when you do an upward two-finger swipe over any icon in your dock you’ll see all the open windows associated with that app. Swipe down to return to normal.
How to disable the scroll gesture?
If for some reason you don’t want the gesture enabled anymore, you can disable it by running defaults write com.apple.dock scroll-to-open -bool false; killall Dock. ( both commands are featured in the screenshot above ).
NOTE: You can enable this gesture on older macOS releases as well, not just on macOS Monterey. In fact, you can enable this one on OS X Mountain Lion which was released back in 2015. If you’re running an older version of macOS/OS X it might be time to get a newer Mac. Or install Linux on your aging Mac.
Usability
The gesture will display your app’s windows differently, depending on the windows position.
If all your app’s windows are in the foreground ( not minimized ), the gesture will display them just like in the screenshot above ( first photo ). Not impressive, since you can already do a four-finger upward swipe for this view.
If you only have one window in the foreground but the rest are minimized, the gesture will display your app’s windows this way:
If some of the windows are in the foreground and some are minimized, the gesture will display your app’s windows this way:
