Exposé on new aluminium keyboards

Sep 2007

We all know by now that Exposé can be activated via F3 on the new aluminium keyboard, but this is only to show all windows. If you want to ‘show the desktop‘ or only ‘windows in current application‘, you can use the old F11 and F10 respectively, and you will have to hold the Fn key down if your keyboard is using multimedia functions for F keys.

But there’s some good news about that F3 key, you can still use it for all Exposé functions, here’s how:

F3 – show all windows
Ctrl-F3 – show all current application windows
Cmnd-F3 – show desktop
Option-F3 – show expose preferences.

Mac

Comments

Marc

September 9th, 2007 at 10:10 PM

Great tip, you can also notice here http://img380.imageshack.us/img380/254/picture1vu1.png that you can add modifier to Mighty Mouse’s buttons if they arent enough for you (i.e if you want middle click).
Brian

September 10th, 2007 at 4:16 AM

What I did is go into System Preferences, Keyboard, and added the F16, F17, F18, F19 keys to do all my expose work.
Jason

September 11th, 2007 at 12:34 AM

Brian: I have a new Silver iMac with the new keyboard, and thus far have elected to use the F3 and F4 keys as standard function keys… This isn’t because I’m a longtime mac-user and used to the old F9-F11 convention (I’m a recent switcher), it’s because I’d rather not have to use modifiers with F3 to access all of the Expose features.

That said, I *never* thought of using those extra function keys above the number pad. To be honest, I don’t think I’ve really ever noticed them… (they don’t exist on PC keyboards… atleast not any PC keyboard I’ve ever used).

I think yours is a great solution, since it will allow me to enable the special funcitons of the function keys on the new aluminum keyboard, AND have a single key for each Expose function.
min

September 11th, 2007 at 12:38 AM

Have you considered using the Hot corner figure? I found it’s much faster to access expose. I set my lower left corner as expose and upper right corner to show desktop. I think you will like it once you try it. :-)