Press Control and Down Arrow on a Mac and every window of the app you are using spreads out across the screen, so you can see all of them at once and pick one. Apple calls it App Exposé. It saves a lot of hunting when you have twelve Finder windows open, and not everyone knows it is there.
It has one limitation, and it is the reason this app exists. App Exposé works on the app that is active right now. If you are writing in one app and want to look at the windows of another, you have to switch to it first, then trigger the spread, then decide, and then possibly switch back. Four moves to answer one question.
Quick Exposé removes the first move. Hold the pointer over any icon in the Dock and that app's windows lay themselves out, whether or not you are using it. Move to the next icon and the layout follows you along the Dock.
Why it took a rewrite
I wrote the first Quick Exposé back in 2013, in Objective-C. It worked, and it had a flaw I never liked: it asked the system where the pointer was on a timer, twice a second. That is fine on paper and slightly sluggish in the hand, and every so often it would react to a movement you had already finished.
Version 2.0 is a new app in Swift. It waits for the Dock to tell it something happened instead of asking twice a second. There is nothing to put in a feature list about that. The layout simply shows up when you expect it to.
What you can change
Two settings matter, and they are the two I kept getting asked about.
- The delay before the layout appears, anywhere from 0.2 to 1.5 seconds. The default is 0.45. Shorter feels instant and sometimes fires when you were only reaching past the Dock; longer never surprises you.
- A modifier key to hold: none, Command, Option, Shift or Control. If you keep triggering the layout by accident, pick one and it will only work when you mean it.
Quick Exposé asks for Accessibility permission the first time you run it. It needs that for exactly one thing: to tell which Dock icon the pointer is over. It sits in the menu bar and puts no icon in the Dock.
A note on the App Store
You will not find Quick Exposé there, and you never will. Asking the Dock to open App Exposé for an app you are not using means calling something Apple never published for third parties. The app is signed and notarized, and it is distributed from this site only. That is also part of why it is free.
If you want more than a spread
App Exposé answers "which window", not "what is in it". The windows shrink to fit the screen, and reading anything in them is a guess.
That is what DockView is for. Same movement of the hand, hover a Dock icon, and you get a panel of live previews of each window, right there, before you click anything. It can also call the very same App Exposé this app does, either instead of the panel or on a key you hold, so the two views are one keystroke apart. On top of that it has a window switcher on Option and Tab and actions you can run on a window from the preview. That one is paid, and the App Exposé part of it landed today as well.
If all of this is new to you, start with the guide: what App Exposé is and every way to trigger it, including the five ways that need no extra software at all.
Quick Exposé runs on macOS 12 and later, on Apple silicon and Intel, and it is free. The download button is on the Quick Exposé page.