Exposé, the application window switching and hiding feature built into OS X  is something you either love or hate. But this article on Exposé is not about its flaws, but instead a cool hidden feature that easily lets you cycle through the open windows of applications open on your Mac.

How to use it: Start Exposé (All Applications or Application Windows) and while its displaying all your open windows hit Tab. Each time you hit Tab, Exposé will cycle from one open application to another, basically switching which application’s windows it’s displaying. If you’re in All Applications mode this will switch Exposé to Application Windows mode, and each subsequent press of Tab will move you to the next application (Shift + Tab to go backwards). Even if there are no applications open with more than one window, this will still cycle through highlighting one window at a time. Pressing Enter will exit Exposé and bring the the selected window/application to the front (Escape also works). A screen shot of this Exposé feature in action can be seen below as well as two videos at the end of this post.

There is no mention of this feature in System Preferences, it seems like one of those things that you’ve got to find for yourself. By default you can enter the Application Windows mode with F10, but this allows easy access to Application Windows from All Applications as well as another nice way to switch applications from Exposé.

I’ve got two videos of this in action, the first shows this trick with single-window applications only while the second shows multi-windowed applications mixed in with single-window applications.

• Expose Tab Trick (Single-Window) 1.1MB
• Exposé Tab Trick (Multi-Window) 3.6MB