What is Aero Shake?
Introduced in Windows 7 and carried over to Windows 10, “Aero Shake” (now simply called “Shake to Minimize”) is a mouse gesture. If you click and hold the title bar of an open window and quickly shake your mouse back and forth, all other open windows on your desktop will immediately minimize to the taskbar, leaving only the window you are shaking visible.
While intended to quickly clear a cluttered desktop, it is extremely easy to trigger this gesture by accident, especially if you have a sensitive mouse or twitchy hand movements. If you find your windows constantly vanishing without warning, you can easily turn this feature off.
How to Disable Shake to Minimize in Windows 10
You can turn off this gesture directly from the Windows multitasking settings.
- Click the Start button and open the Settings app (the gear icon).
- Click on System from the main menu.
- In the left-hand navigation sidebar, click on Multitasking.
- Look for the section near the top labelled Title bar window shake (in some older versions of Windows 10, this might simply be a toggle under “Snap”).
- Toggle the switch to the Off position (or uncheck the box that says “When I grab a window’s title bar and shake it, minimize all other windows”).
The change takes effect immediately. You can now grab and violently move any window across your screen without fear of accidentally minimizing the rest of your open applications.