After a window moves aside,
do you remember where it was?

You’re writing. A reference window covers your draft, but you’ll need it again soon. Closing is too final; pushing it aside crowds everything else.

WindowShade rolls the contents up and leaves only the title bar. What was behind shows through, and the window stays where it was. Try it below, then compare minimizing and overview.

All three work. A rolled-up window stays where it was, as a thin bar on the desk. Minimizing leaves the cleanest desk, but you have to find the window in the Dock to get it back. Overview shows every window at once by rearranging the whole desk for a moment.

The January 1994 Mini’app’les issue lists WindowShade 1.2 among freeware and shareware, credited to Interactive Technologies and Rob Johnston, with a 1989–92 copyright range.

It did what it does today: double-click the title bar and only the bar is left; double-click again and the contents come back. With System 7.5, Apple built it into the system and gave it a page in the upgrade guide. A utility you once had to find came with every Mac.

The system took the gesture on but left the count to you. The control panel let you turn it off or pick two or three clicks, require a modifier key, and choose whether it made a sound.

Set it to three clicks, then double-click out of habit. When nothing happens, you’ll notice your fingers moved before you thought about it.

Mac OS 8, in 1997, added a collapse box at the right of the title bar. People who never knew about the double-click could now see the feature; the double-click still worked.

A rolled-up window could still be dragged. Move the bar somewhere else, unroll it, and the window opens there.

Apple showed Aqua and the Dock in 2000, and Mac OS X went on sale on March 24, 2001. A minimized window now shrank into the Dock and left its place.

Later came ways to see every window at once: Exposé arrived with Panther in 2003 and spread overlapping windows out for you to pick from; Mission Control came with Lion in 2011.

These are all for finding windows. When you only want one window out of the way for a moment, rolling it up is still the simplest: nothing else moves.

Mac OS X had no roll-up, so people built their own: Unsanity’s WindowShade X, later WindowMizer, and Deskovery. None of them were related; they solved the same problem.

They didn’t all work the same way. Deskovery’s own documentation says it shows a copy of the window while moving the original off screen or minimizing it. It looks the same; underneath it’s something else.

Stickies, which comes with every Mac, never lost it. Apple’s current guide still says to double-click a note’s title bar to collapse it, and the first line stays in the bar, so you can tell the notes apart.

Today’s WindowShade is a small open-source app for macOS 15 and later, developed in public since June 2026. The name and the idea come from back then; the code is new, and it isn’t an Apple product.

Double-click the title bar and the window rolls up into a thin bar, right where it was; double-click again and it’s back, just as in 1994. It does a few more things too: pin a window so it stays in front while you work, rest on a Dock icon to see every window that app has, and close the lid while the desktop seems to stay put.