Leopard External Monitor Annoyance Solved...aka Hide All Apps on a Mac

One of the more annoying things about Leopard is that when you plug in an external monitor that is set up to be your primary, your open applications don’t move over to the monitor. I was having to manually drag everything over. Then I realized that if I hid all my apps before plugging in the monitor, when I brought them up again, they’d be in the right place.

So now the question was: is there an easy way to hide all your apps without cycling through them all? It took a bit of digging, but it turns out there is. Cmd-option-click on an app in the Dock and it will hide all other apps. So I tried Cmd-option-click on the desktop itself and…voilà!

Update: Technically, you’re Cmd-option-clicking on the Finder, so if you have any Finder windows open, they won’t hide. Bummer.