Minimize, Maximize and Close Windows: Shortcuts

Window management is something you do a few hundred times a day without ever thinking about it, which makes it the place where a handful of shortcuts pay for themselves fastest. Most people learn Alt + Tab and stop there. The rest of this set takes maybe ten minutes to pick up and removes an enormous amount of mousing.

Minimizing a window

Minimizing tucks a window away to the taskbar without closing it. The program keeps running, keeps its memory, keeps whatever you had open. That difference matters more than it sounds: a minimized document has not been saved, it has just been put out of sight, and it is entirely possible to lose work by forgetting which one you did.

• Mouse: click the underscore icon at the top right of the window, or click the program's taskbar button while the window is in front.
• Keyboard: Win + Down. On a maximized window this restores it to its previous size; press again to minimize.
• Everything at once: Win + M minimizes every open window. Win + Shift + M brings them back.
• Everything except this one: Win + Home, or grab the title bar and shake the mouse — the Aero Shake gesture, which is off by default in Windows 11 and can be re-enabled under Settings → System → Multitasking.

Maximizing and snapping

Maximizing fills the screen. Snapping fills half of it, or a quarter, and on any monitor wider than about 24 inches snapping is by far the more useful of the two.

Windows 11 adds Snap Layouts: hover the maximize button, or press Win + Z, and pick a layout from the grid. On a wide monitor the three-column layout is the one worth learning. Windows 10 has quarter-snapping through Win + Left then Win + Up, but no layout picker.

Closing a window, and the Alt + F4 confusion

Alt + F4 closes the active window, and if that is the application's last window it usually closes the application too. The thing to appreciate is that it is a polite request: the program gets its chance to ask you about unsaved work. That is the important difference between closing something and force-quitting it.

The confusion is what happens when nothing is focused. Click the desktop, press Alt + F4, and you get the shut-down dialog. That is correct behaviour — the desktop is a window and this is its close action, but it looks like a bug the first time.

• Ctrl + W closes the current tab or document rather than the whole application. In a browser, Alt + F4 closes every tab and Ctrl + W closes one.
• Ctrl + Shift + T reopens the tab you just closed, in every major browser.
• Middle-click a taskbar button to open a second window of the same application; middle-click a tab to close it.

Switching between windows

Alt + Tab flips you to the last window you used. Hold it down and you get a picker you can move through with Tab or the arrow keys. Ctrl + Alt + Tab opens the same picker but leaves it up when you let go, which is much easier when you have a dozen windows and need a moment to find the right one.

Win + number jumps straight to the application at that position on the taskbar — Win + 1 for the first, Win + 2 for the second. Pinning your four most-used applications in a fixed order and learning those four keys removes most of your Alt + Tab traffic.

Win + Tab opens Task View, which also holds virtual desktops. Win + Ctrl + D creates one, Win + Ctrl + Left/Right moves between them, Win + Ctrl + F4 closes the current one. Virtual desktops are genuinely useful for separating work from everything else on a single-monitor machine.

Windows across two monitors

Win + Shift + Left and Win + Shift + Right throw the active window to the next monitor without resizing it. Pressing Win + Left repeatedly also walks a window across monitors, snapping to each half on the way, which is fiddlier but handy when you want it snapped the moment it arrives.

If the shortcut sends a window somewhere unexpected, your monitors are probably arranged in Windows in a different order from the way they sit on your desk. Setting up dual monitors properly fixes that once, and the cursor stops catching on invisible edges too.

The four worth learning first

1. Win + D — clear the screen, and put it all back with a second press.
2. Win + Left / Right — two windows side by side without touching the mouse.
3. Alt + F4 — close what is in front of you.
4. Win + Shift + Left / Right — throw a window onto the other monitor.

Everything else in the table above is worth having somewhere findable, but those four cover the large majority of day-to-day window handling. If you are keyboard-minded generally, the guide to opening a terminal in Windows covers the launch shortcuts that pair with these.