Click Your Desktop to Reveal It: PeekDesktop Brings macOS Sonoma's Hidden Desktop Trick to Windows

You probably know the feeling: you're buried under a dozen open windows, and you just need to grab a file from your desktop. On Windows, the classic approach is Win+D or that sliver of a button at the far right of the taskbar. But if you've ever watched a macOS user casually click their desktop wallpaper to reveal everything underneath, you might have wondered why that isn't a thing on Windows. Well, now it is. PeekDesktop is a lightweight system tray tool that lets you click empty desktop wallpaper (or an empty area of the taskbar) to hide all open windows, and click again to bring them all back exactly where they were.

What It Does

PeekDesktop is a free, open-source utility for Windows 10 and 11 that mimics the macOS Sonoma behavior of revealing the desktop when you click the wallpaper. It's built by Scott Hanselman and lives in your system tray, consuming less than 5 MB of RAM when idle. No admin rights are required, and there's no installer—you just download a zip, extract it, and run the executable.

The core interaction is simple: click empty wallpaper or an empty spot on the taskbar, and all your windows minimize. Click them again (or click any window, the taskbar, or the wallpaper a second time), and everything restores to its exact previous position and state, including maximized windows. The tool distinguishes between clicking empty space and clicking desktop icons or taskbar buttons, so you can still interact with your files and pinned apps normally.

Under the hood, PeekDesktop uses a mix of Windows APIs. It hooks into low-level mouse events with SetWindowsHookEx(WH_MOUSE_LL), identifies what you're clicking with WindowFromPoint and accessibility APIs (MSAA and UI Automation), and manages window state with EnumWindows and SetWindowPlacement. It offers two "peek styles": a default mode that uses Explorer's native Show Desktop behavior, and an experimental "Fly Away" mode that animates windows offscreen (with known quirks around external window management like Win+D).

The tool also includes a built-in auto-updater that downloads new releases, verifies the code signature, and restarts itself in place—so you don't have to manually check for updates.

Why It's Cool

The appeal here is more nuanced than just "it's like macOS." There are several specific things that make PeekDesktop worth looking at:

• It respects your existing workflow. The default mode uses Explorer's native Show Desktop behavior, which means it plays well with how Windows already manages your desktop. The experimental Fly Away mode is there if you want visual flair, but the sensible default just works.

• It distinguishes icons from empty space. This is the hard part. A naive click-on-wallpaper approach would trigger every t