Trackpad gestures and keyboard shortcuts, or: Windows 10 for the Mac user

Window management gets much better, at least if you have the right hardware.

Clicking buttons is for chumps! Here's how you navigate through the Windows 10 desktop using only a compatible trackpad and your keyboard shortcuts. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

My primary computers are Macs and their primary operating system is OS X, so one of the things I disliked the most about going back to Windows was its window management. Features like Snap were handy, but it was hard to live without features like Mission Control. And once you get used to OS X’s trackpad gestures, it’s hard to move to a platform where basic things like “two-finger scrolling” can be flaky and inconsistent.

Windows 10 catches up in some important ways—it’s got a Mission Control replacement in Task View, can give you multiple virtual desktops to work with, and implements Mac-like trackpad gestures (alongside keyboard shortcuts) to help you use it all.

If you’re new to Windows 10, here’s your guide to using these shortcuts and gestures, and what kind of hardware you’ll need to use them.

Trackpad gestures and Precision Touchpads

What you'll see if your PC includes a Precision Touchpad. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Gesture	Action
Three-finger tap	Cortana search by default, can be changed to view notifications in Settings
Three-finger swipe up	Task View. Swipe down with three fingers to close Task View.
Three-finger swipe down	Show desktop. Swipe up with three fingers to bring your windows back.
Three-finger swipe left/right	Switch between open windows. If you hold your fingers to the trackpad as you swipe, you'll be able to select different windows via the Alt-Tab switcher.

Getting accustomed to the multitouch trackpad gestures is key to effective window management in OS X. Using a combination of swipes and Full Screen mode on a 13-inch MacBook eases the pain of moving away from a multi-monitor workstation.

Windows 10 finally implements comparable gestures, a nice upgrade over Windows 8’s more limited edge swipes. The downside is that you need specific hardware to use the gestures—for now, they’re only enabled on PCs that support Windows’ Precision Touchpad spec. This requires not just compatible multitouch trackpad hardware, but special firmware and Microsoft certification. In other words, at least as of this writing, it’s not something you can enable with a simple driver update, though for more recent systems your OEM may choose to mimic the gestures in their own drivers.

Keyboard shortcuts

Shortcut	Action
Windows key + Up	Maximize window.
Windows key + down	Minimize window.
Windows key + left/right	Snap window to left/right half of screen. Keep pressing left/right to keep moving window across multiple monitors.
Windows key + left/right, then up/down	Snap window to a quadrant.
Windows key + Tab	Task view. You don't need to hold the buttons down to stay in Task View. Press again to exit Task View.
Windows key + Ctrl + D	Create a new virtual desktop.
Windows key + Ctrl + F4	Close current virtual desktop.
Windows key + Ctrl + left/right	Switch between virtual desktops.

Let’s assume your PC doesn’t include a Precision Touchpad, because hey, it probably doesn’t. If you want to use the new window management stuff quickly without resorting to dragging your mouse pointer around on the screen, the keyboard shortcuts are nearly as useful for people who bother to learn them (and they can do a few things, like creating and switching between virtual desktops, that the trackpad gestures can't).

This isn't the complete list of keyboard shortcuts in Windows, but they’re the most important ones when it comes to general window management.