Why does there seem to be no action in BTT to bring back an app window from the dock (to 'unminimize' it)?

Configuration Help & General Discussion
1

Hi everyone,

when you click on the yellow button provided by MacOS in the top left corner of app windows it minimizes the app to the dock.

Now I am looking for an action that would allow to bring back an app window from the dock, so to un-minimize the app window.

When going through all actions concerning "window", "application" "hide", "dock", "minimize" I could not find any action that would bring back an app from the dock...

I tried "restore window size", "center window", "show specific app" (only show) ... but nothing has an effect:(

As BTT does offer a "minimize" action I find that rather strange, that there is no "unminimize" action so I hope I did not overlook anything ?
Or is that due to a limitation within MacOS ?

Thanks a lot in advance,

Tormen

2

Minimizing is easy because you know which window to minimize.
Unminimizing is complicated because how would you determine which window shall be unminimized?

Possibly try this apple script which will just unminimize all windows

tell application "AppName"
  try
        set miniaturized of windows to false -- most apps
    end try
    try
        set collapsed of windows to false -- Finder
    end try
end tell
3

Hi Andreas,

thanks a lot for your answer. About how to select the window: I would be fine to unminize all windows of an application.
Unfortunately the provided AppleScript did not work. Probably then an App-specific problem (Notion.app) ?
Tried googleing and a couple of more AppleScripts, non of them did anything to undock my Notion window.
I will then just try to NOT minimize the app and rather use the hide/unhide action which works fine (except if the app is minimized).

A pity that apple does not offer a "Dock" object which could contain the applications in dock and if they are running, but also a list of the minimized windows together with the applications they belong to.

I posted another question a while back (think never got an answer) about show/hide application where I ran across the same problem that if the window is minimized it is NOT shown (as promised by the actions name ;))... but I believe you that it's simply not easily possible.

So thanks again!

4

You are right the scripts don't seem to work like this anymore. I can check what changed.

However what seems to work for me is to use the "Launch Application / Open File /..." action. So far it seems to unminimize all apps I tried.

5

The apple script should look like this on modern macOS:

tell application "Google Chrome"
	tell every window
		set minimized to false
	end tell
end tell
6

Ok, THIS worked:

tell application "Notion"
  reopen -- unminimizes the first minimized window or makes a new default window
  activate -- makes the app frontmost
end tell

Now it would be nice to have an option on the "show/hide" action to allow
unminimize when showing

About the "Launch Application" thingy : Yes that is an awesome built-in feature that I discovered and use extensively already for my "main" apps like Firefox, Mail... to switch to them and activate them "Launch" is the BEST as it also works when the app is in fullscreen (and thus in it's own desktop...).

But Notion is a small app that I want to show/hide... and thus I would need an action "Launch or Hide":

Launch if app is not running OR Hide if app is running

<<< such an action would be AWESOME !!! as it would leverage the power of "Launch" and would allow to "toggle" windows visible/hidden!!!

7

@Andreas_Hegenberg, any chance such an Action could be added to BTT?