How to Hide Apps While Screen Sharing on a Mac

You hit Share in Zoom, and suddenly everyone can read your Slack. A calendar reminder about a candidate interview slides in from the corner. A password manager sits in the Dock with a badge. Screen sharing on a Mac shows everything unless you deliberately hide it — and macOS gives you surprisingly few tools for that.

What macOS gives you out of the box

There are a few built-in options, each with real limits:

• Share a single window instead of the whole screen. Works until you need to switch apps mid-demo, which is almost always.
• Turn on Do Not Disturb / a Focus mode. This silences banners, but it does nothing about windows that are already open.
• Hide apps manually with Cmd+H before the call. Reliable, but you have to remember every app, every time — and un-hide them all afterwards.

The gap is obvious: none of these are one action. They're a pre-flight checklist you run under pressure, usually while someone is waiting on the call.

The one-click approach

This is exactly the job Hush was built for. You tell it once which apps are sensitive — Slack, Mail, Telegram, your bank — and from then on a single shortcut hides all of them at once. When the call ends, one more click brings everything back exactly where it was.

Because Hush runs entirely on your Mac, there's no account and nothing leaves your machine. It does one job — clearing your screen before other people see it — and stays out of the way the rest of the time.

A simple pre-share routine

• Enable a Focus mode so new notifications stay silent.
• Trigger Hush (or Cmd+H through your list of risky apps) to clear open windows.
• Share a window, not a screen, when you genuinely only need one app.

Thirty seconds of setup, and screen sharing stops being a small gamble with your private life. You can learn more about Hush on its product page.