I got tried of accidentally hitting the CMD-H key and having a window disappear. So I wrote this little script and then assigned it to CMD-SHIFT-H to restore (unhide, unminimize) all hidden or minimized windows. Works on OS X 10.6, 10.7, 10.8, and 10.9 Snow Leopard, Lion, Mountain Lion, and Mavericks. Feel free to post improvements in the comments. I also think it would be cool to figure out the last window that was hidden, something like tell previous application and just restore that one. But this works for now.
tell application "System Events"
repeat with theApplication in application processes
if visible of theApplication is not true then
set visible of theApplication to true
end if
end repeat
end tell
You can also do this with an Application like Terminal.app:
tell application "System Events"
repeat with theApplication in application "Terminal"
if visible of theApplication is not true then
set visible of theApplication to true
end if
end repeat
end tell
Sometimes if you have “Minimized” instead of “Hidden” an application, it still won’t come back into the foreground when using the previous methods, so you can also try something like this:
do shell script "open '/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app'"
This works by telling the application to “open” again which should also bring it to the front.
Hi
Thanks for the script. there is an issue while restoring the windows. I use another script to hide all windows. when i unhide with this script, it does not focus on the last active window. How could I make a make a script to toggle hide/unhide the windiws and restore the last active window in front.
Thanks