Are there any currently available third party apps that allow the pairing of apps - i.e. click on an icon and the two (or more) apps will appear together in their previously set positions and hide others? That’s the main feature I think might be useful on the Mac.
(Answering my own question… I guess if I regularly use the same sets of apps I could simply create a shortcut to open them all - seems to work).
Keyboard Maestro…!?
(And now for 20 more characters…)
I’ve not tried, it so I may love it. But I much prefer full screen or split screen (iPad or Mac). Why would you waste space on the left and right. I want my apps to use as much of the screen as possible.
Yeah, I think most people on forums like this already have a window management solution. I know I do.
My wife on the other hand … she will love this. She is constantly sliding windows off the edge of the screen to reveal another. But she does not spend enough time on the computer to invest the time to learn to use spaces, to say nothing of third party tools. Having this built in will be great for people like her.
I could see myself using this on an ad hoc basis, but then I have three 20" plus monitors, so giving up some real estate may not bet so bad. We’ll see.
Many apps do not need the full width of a display, like Safari, Mail, Notes. In fact they are better a bit narrow, imo.
I’m currently loving Stage Manager with the windows full height for these sorts of things on my Mac.
Yeah, that may be the case, but it’s not the density it volume of info in all apps (although this is the case in some) it’s the focus of not having extra “info” on the screen to distract me.
As I said, I’ve not used it and I may love it, but the more distraction free I can make my screen the better for me.
By the way, playing around still, I’ve now got my dock (whichI usually have on the left) auto-hiding (I never liked this before), and this arrangement suits we really well.
It’s a bit like an enlarged, focused, informative dock on the left, with other items still available a bit further left.
I need to dust off my LEAP device. Its tedious to use it though.
I would really just appreciate it if they brought back the desktop grid. The feature they used to call “spaces” before they built mission control. Mission control is a step backwards from what we had and stage manager seems cool, but like a more complicated solution than expose/spaces. Please just give me a grid of desktops instead of a single row and I’ll be happy.
Gary has just pushed this:
So I took the plunge and got Ventura Public Beta installed on my MacBook Air.
Contrary to my own skepticism on this, I actually like Stage Manager. The reason I do is that it makes task modularity the default rule to be excepted only when explicitly declared by the user.
For a long while, I’ve been using a tiling window manager (TWM, in my case Amethyst) and spaces to group apps for different tasks.
While I like this modularity approach, sometimes I forget to open a new space to accommodate a new window for a different task. When you use floating/overlapping windows, it gets messy. When you use a TWM, it just gets smaller.
If we consider the task modularity paradigm is that:
By default, Stage Manager open every new window in its own workspace (not sure about this word, but will use it to separate it from the concept of spaces). It works pretty much as if it opened a new space for each new window. Pairs can be created by moving an existing window into the current workspace.
This changes the defaults to:
This little change in the defaults is allowing me to keep a tidy desktop with much less effort than before.
For TWM folks out there, Amethyst does not work properly with Stage Manager, but Swish works great (except for the resizing of adjacent windows that must be turned off).
I just installed the beta on my iPad. Not going to put it on my Mac until the public release. Using Stage Manager on iPad, I felt real gratitude to the Apple developers who created it - and kept thinking “wow, when Apple gets something right, they really do get it right”.
The use case seems like it would be less compelling on Mac, where I find Moom does everything I want for window management - but still excited to try it in September.
Very well written. I am so looking forward to stage manager in Ventura…
I’ve been running the Ventura beta on my Mac Mini for the last week or so and have barely turned off SM. Not sure how it will fly if I put it on my laptop but so far I like it.
I’ve been testing it on Mac for the first time for about 2 days. I love the extra tool to organize my apps. I’ve gone from 4 desktops to only 2. It was totally intuitive for me, I’d not been on the betas.
I’ve no intention of trying it on iPad until it’s fixed. I will once it gets through the growing pains with an external keyboard (the Smart Keyboard, which I use all the time).
A big thumbs up to this new feature from me 
I read that in someone else’s review of Stage Manager. It’s probably a bug.
I’ve been using it for a few weeks on two Macs at home and had to work on a Monterey iMac in my office yesterday, and i found the absence of Stage Manager exasperating.
I configured it yesterday, and got some nice window layouts in there. And overall, I like it - but with a major caveat.
When I’m on a “stage” and I command-space to open another app, like System Settings, it flashes it for the briefest of moments - and then dumps it behind the window. Basically, it opens the app, realizes that app isn’t part of my current “stage”, and moves it behind whatever I’m working on.
This seems like odd default behavior in response to an intentional user action. Has anybody else noticed this?
Yes i also noticed this behaviour.
SM looks great but for me it is not much different than having a permanent Dock always visible. Not really that useful, although I will probably give it a go for a couple of weeks and see if it sticks.