Deskovery Documentation

Requirements

Deskovery 4 requires macOS Big Sur or newer (11). It runs on both Intel chips and Apple Silicon (M1 or newer).

Installation

Installation is simple but Deskovery needs a couple of authorisations to enable all features.

Installing the application

Here are the steps to install Deskovery:

Unzip the archive containing Deskovery
Copy Deskovery.app to the /Applications folder

Allowing access to Accessibility

Accessibility access is required for all features of Deskovery. It allows to manage (query, bring to front, resize) windows not belonging to Deskovery.

After allowing access to accessibility, the application needs to be restarted.

Popup shown when Deskovery has no access to Accessibility

Allowing access to accessibility to Deskovery

Allowing access to Screen recording

Screen recording is required for Dock thumbnails

After allowing access to screen recording, the application needs to be restarted.

The message shown when Deskovery is not allowed to perform screenshots

You may need to click on the lock and enter your credentials to check Deskovery 4 in the right pane.

General information

You can access most of the settings and infos by using the Menu Bar menu.

Window Shading

Window shading (also know as minimise to titlebar) is a function allowing to minimise in place a window.

Deskovery provides 2 different ways to minimise a window:

Defining per application shading behavior

To Titlebar

You can per application, specify a custom shading height.

To Thumbnails

Notes

Window shading is done on a copy of the actual window. The source window is either moved outside screen or minimised in the Dock.
Minimized window can have the wobbly effect.

Dock Thumbnails

Dock Thumbnails allows you to see all the windows of an application when placing your mouse over its icon in the Dock.

You can then click on a thumbnail to bring the window to front.

All Dock orientations are supported.

Dock thumbnails can be disabled in Preferences.

Window Resizer

The resizer can ben shown by using a keyboard shortcut or when hovering the zoom button of a window.

Other Preferences

In addition of preferences already describe above, Deskovery also provides the following settings:

General settings

Launch at login: Allows Deskovery to start automatically when you open your session. This setting is per user.

Keyboard shortcuts

Keyboard shortcuts are not set by default in order to avoid conflicts with applications already installed on your machine.