My favorite keyboard shortcut on OS X is “Hide Others”, which hides every other window except the currently focused one. It’s a great way to quickly clean up your desktop and focus on the task at hand. So how to get this for Windows?

The obvious choice to implement this functionality was to use AutoHotkey, but I simply didn’t have the time to figure it out myself… so I mentioned it to reader Shawn over instant message.

About 15 minutes later, he’d come up with the solution, which I’m sharing for everybody.

Usage 

To invoke: just use Win+Alt+H

The Windows version won’t have a menu item like the OS X screenshot above, but it does work nearly the same… because Windows doesn’t have a good method for hiding windows the way OS X does, this script just simply minimizes all the windows on the screen apart from the current one.

If you’d like to change the keyboard shortcut, you can easily do that by modifying the script.

Installation

You’ll need to have AutoHotkey installed, and then just double-click on the downloaded script file to start it.

Download AutoHotkey from Autohotkey.com

Download Hide Others AutoHotkey Script

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Lowell is the founder and CEO of How-To Geek. He’s been running the show since creating the site back in 2006. Over the last decade, Lowell has personally written more than 1000 articles which have been viewed by over 250 million people. Prior to starting How-To Geek, Lowell spent 15 years working in IT doing consulting, cybersecurity, database management, and programming work.
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