Me too. This is a great tip.
However, is there a way to dismiss the app from the stage? I mean, I could drag it out of the stage back to the side pane and it will go away but would love a clicking trick (I tried shift click minimize button to no avail)
Edit: if I hover the mouse on the green (maximize) button on the window, there is a “Remove Window from Set” choice, which is fine with me, although I still would like something faster.
I am using an ultrawide and have enough horizontal space. As such, I actually prefer that I can see a Preview of the apps. In fact, I bemoan the low quality Preview images (ok, maybe that’s on me for using a lower resolution (bigger text))
The reappearance of this thread reminds me that Stage Manager exists. I am trying a dual monitor setup (picked up a refurb Studio Display yesterday) and wonder if I might be able to make good use of this.
But I’ve gotten very good at Command + H and Command + Option + H over the years, so… ¯_(ツ)_/¯ I’m at the point where having multiple Spaces can even slow me down. I’m definitely going to give Stage Manager another shot while I’m in the return period for the second monitor, though.
I use it a lot, particularly when studying and researching when I might have several apps open at once. I lose my position when I have to flick through five or six spaces.
At any one time I will have Zotero, a text editor of some sort, University VLE, another browser, and Obsidian. For me Stage manager is quicker and easier.
That is me too, and then I try it for a couple of hours (again) and wonder why people like it so much. I find traditional keyboard commands combined with trackpad gestures much easier/quicker.
You know what would be a fun experiment? Take a sample of people new to windowing and have them try out both SM and Mission Control/Spaces to see if any use patterns emerge.
As I’ve said in this thread and elsewhere, I like both methods and feel equally comfortable with both. I suspect Apple added SM to macOS to ease the transition between using both an iPad and macOS. SM on iPad feels more fleshed out and a bit better than it does on Mac, and that is primarily because there are more keyboard shortcuts to manage the experience on iPadOS.
By the way, with Mission Control/Spaces on Macs, beyond keyboard shortcuts there are also some really efficient trackpad gestures that make it really convenient to navigate windows and move them around.
I have used SM for almost a week and I am going to keep using it. For me, the having the ultrawide (thanks @MitchWagner ) and the Shift-left click to add a window to the Stage (thanks @dustying ) are the main reasons I continue to find SM useful. I now group apps into a few categories: audio editing with its own Chrome browser, forums, emails and calendar, social media+news (Ice Cubes, Threads, Unread), Excels+Zoom and MacOS (Finder, Settings). It does make all these opened windows/apps manageable. Lovin’ it!
It would be a great SM addition to macOS if Apple would:
make shift-click work to open un-launched apps on the current stage;
enable you to use Shift+left-click from Spotlight to bring an app into the stage; and
enable you to drag an app from Spotlight onto the stage.
Those are all features that SM has on iPadOS, and I add apps to the stage from Spotlight frequently throughout the day on iPadOS. I’d do the same on macOS, if the features were avaiable.
Oh yes! These would be great. I often have to launch new app which then open in its Stage, click on the group to open that Group to Stage and thus sending this new app to background and Shift click to add the new app to the group. Many clicks to do something that should be one click. You say it’s already in iPad OS? Then I think it’s just a matter of time that the Mac gets it!
I learned a new thing from watching Gary (of macmost.com)'s video on SM. If you clicked on the app icon in the Stage Manager, it will show all the windows of the app, even if they are on a different App set. Nice!
Another thing, which I didn’t notice until now - say you have an App set with 3 apps and you minimize one. The minimized app returned to side bar. Then, you clicked on another App set and these 3 apps are sent to the side bar. When you returned back to this 3-app set, Mac will open the 2 apps and kept the first one minimized, as it were. I find this useful because I have a “Work” set that often times clutter the screen and I can send, say, Excel documents to the sidebar by minimizing them, yet, not removing them from the set.
Is there a keyboard shortcut to switch between apps in an App Set?
I have a 3 apps in the screen. One of them is Safari and often, it covers the whole screen, so the other 2 apps are hidden. If I do Mission Control or App Expose or Cmd Tab, all apps (within the same desktops) are shown. I wish there is a way that I can easily tab between the apps in this App Set!
Edit: AWESOME - the answer is…. ⌘ ` (tilde) is the keyboard shorcut.
I use this shortcut often to switch between windows of the same app. I did not realize that MacOS treats different apps of the same App Set as though they are different windows!
I like SM on iPad. I find it good for focused work that requires two windows to be open. I also use Split View, I think I’m not very fussy.
I’ve never used SM on a Mac, but I don’t use Spaces either. I just open and minimise windows from the dock like it’s the 90s… I am kind of intrigued and I might try it next week, but I also suspect I like the level of control I exert over what I have open at any one time. I really dislike having a million windows open, even if they’re behind each other and you can’t see them. I tend to minimise or close windows that aren’t in use. I’m also a fan of being able to see my desktop and having ‘space” around windows I’m working in. I’m on an ultrawide monitor though so I can afford to do that.
I’m almost the opposite. I use spaces constantly and almost never minimize apps or use the dock. From my perspective, stage manager seems to be a sort of secondary dock for open applications that wastes even more screen space, though it does fix the issue of minimized apps getting “lost” in the dock.
As I make more use of use Stage Manager on my ultrawide display, I realize the reason I use it is that it defaults to one app per stage. I don’t like to have an individual app maximized to fullscreen, but I don’t like a cluttered background either.
You might well ask, “Mitch, if you don’t like your apps that big, and you only want one app per screen, why did you buy an ultrawide display?” The answer is that I often need two apps per screen, and in that case one is on the left and one is on the right and I use every pixel.
That was very much my reasoning in this post, comparing it to spaces.
While I like this approach better than spaces, I still find myself lacking keyboard shortcuts to houseless group two windows and also separate a window from an existing set. So I still use spaces and hope for keyboard shortcuts to be added to the macOS version (shift+click on iPadOS spotlight works fine, but on macOS I guess I would still miss the same implementation for Alfred… or perhaps that would make me try spotlight again instead of Alfred…).
