Show desktop gesture

It's a spread out gesture with thumb and 3 fingers. It's ridiculous and doesn't work 25% of the time. No idea what they were thinking with this one. And it's not even customizable. Horrible.

I completely agree. I use show desktop several times per hour of use, and the new gesture is nearly unusable. Why is there no use option to use the old gesture?

ditto

OMG I think this is a major oversight.

It was a major step up from Leopard that the four finger swipe brought up the heads-up screen and Desktop. Now the only way to see all apps open is command-Tab.

Agreed the thumb-three finger, not only awkward does not work 50% of the time, making it much harder to get to the Desktop. This is something you do all the time ! Back to fn-F11 or conveniently control-click missioncontrol icon on the Dock.

MissionControl ? Not so useful if you can not access the open and hidden files, what where they thinking??? three finger, four finger, Dock icon why all those options at the expense of the most useful in a day today day work machine.

Hopefully they can modify the TrackPad preferences in a future update to bring these most functional gestures back!

Please make your voice heard:

http://www.apple.com/feedback/

It's very silly that after work with some gesture for a long time now it's gone. I hope that this would be fixed in the next update.

As a workaround I enabled one "Hot Corner" (System Preferences/Mission Control/Hot Corners), and assigned it to "Desktop". Is not the best solution, but I think that's better than the current gesture.

Especially if you happen to have long finger nails..

Im currently in the process of backing everything up so I can reimage my machine back to Snow Leopard. I have tried to get used to this Mission Control over the past couple of days and I just can not do it. I too was a major user of the four finger up to go to the desktop.

After a few broken fingers and hands riding dirt bikes i just cant make that spreading action - a slight problem.

And that only works when you're NOT in full-screen.

I miss the four fingers too and even if lion is pretty good for a lot of things , the gestures are just messed up....gestures in lion are almost as bad as the ribbon in office...though the ribbon is still the crappiest thing I' ve seen in 30 years of IT

anyway to show the desktop I switched back to the old good "command D" and it works 100% of the times. I disabled most of the gestures because the situation is worsened by the button-less track pads....they just left click and right click when they are not meant to...

The OS looks great and it's faster but Apple you screwed...badly this time...

The best way I have found to get the new 'show desktop' gesture to work is keeping your fingers close the edge of the trackpad when doing it (see below pic). Position three fingers on the upper edge of the trackpad and your thumb on the lower left corner of the trackpad then perform the gesture (you must approach the trackpad ready to perform the gesture, in other words, don't try and position your fingers first, just make it as smooth as you possibly can). If you attempt to do it with the three fingers too close to the center it will be mistaken for the 'mission control' 4 finger gesture instead. I hope apple adjusts the sensitivity for this gesture on upcoming patches but, for me, doing it this way gets it right everytime... hope this helps somebody.

OMG, I have been trying repeatably to get this to work...and I can't. I am using hot corners to show desktop until this gets fixed.

SOLVED !

I was also puzzled and frustrated with this gesture as you are, but I believe I solved it (by chance!).

And it's working 100% of the times. Instead of trying to spread thumb+3 fingers, just put all 5 fingers together in the center of the pad and spread them all - do not care too much about direction - just spread them.

Hope it helps!

It was way better in Snow Leopard. But it seems to improve if you change the mission control gesture to four fingers, rather than three - especially if you're always getting mission control when you want show desktop.

the F11 key will show your desktop. (fn key + f11 key)

I too miss Snow Leopard