Mastering Multitasking Tools and Techniques on Your Mac

hi this is Gary with macmost.com let's take a look at the different multitasking tools and techniques on your Mac [Music] most is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than a thousand supporters go to macmost.com patreon there you could read more about the patreon campaign join us and get exclusive content and course discounts let's talk about multitasking specifically how to view multiple apps and windows at the same time or quickly switch between them so let's start off with the simplest tool that's been around the longest and that's simply using multiple windows on your desktop so here you can see I've got a variety of Windows from different apps I've got a couple Pages documents open a Safari browser window the notes app a couple finder windows I can quickly switch between these by simply clicking on the window that I want so if I want to focus on this finder window I can click it and it comes to the front and now I'm using that window if I want to go to this Pages document I can click that and bring that to the front I can also move these around as I like I can click and drag on the toolbar at the top I can also click and drag the sides or Corners to resize the windows I can place them next to each other there's even some snapping going on so it'll allow you to nicely align the edges of these windows and you can arrange them to be on top of each other so they overlap and you can see what's there or you can arrange them to be next to each other it's up to you you can arrange these any way you want now in addition to clicking to switch to different windows and bring them to the front you can also use other tools as well for instance you can use the app switcher command tab continue to hold command down get to the app that you want and then release the command key that will bring that window to the front now notice if I do it with an app that has more than one window open like Pages has these two so I do command and then tab over to pages I release and both of those windows come to the front but you can also use any other technique you would normally use to get to an app so let's say I've got notes here and Safari up front and I've got these Pages Windows behind well if I were to switch to Pages by using the dock down here and click you can see they both come to the front thought but if I were to you say LaunchPad and then go to pages notice how only the top window comes to the front the other one remains behind this is also true if you use Spotlight I use Spotlight to switch to the app and you can see it just brings the top window to the front now if you want to bring a specific window to the front you can do that using the dock if you go down here to the dock and click on hold on an icon or you can control click to bring it up quicker you'll see the open Windows there's two of them right here and I can pick a specific one and it will bring that one to the front and leave the other one where it is another way to switch between Windows is when you're in an app like I'm in Pages now if I go to window I can see all of the currently open windows in pages and switch to one using this menu another tool you've got here is the ability to hide an app so let's say I'm using Pages here if I go to Pages hide pages command H I can easily hide all of the windows for that app the app is still running if I use the app switcher command tab you can see it's still there and selecting in the app switcher will unhide it and bring all of its windows to the front another technique you've got is the ability to minimize a window now if you just want to hide one window the way to do that is to minimize you've got the yellow button here or you can use window minimize command m that will take that one window and put it into the dock so you should see it here on the right and I can click there to unminimize it but a setting that you've got if you go into system settings desktop and Doc you can select minimize Windows into application icon and we have that turned on then you don't get them added to the dock you basically click and it goes into the app icon which is pretty much the equivalent to hiding just that window so now to bring it back up I can click here and I can go and select that window and then we'll bring it back now in addition to the app switcher you also have the window switcher which is command and then the key above tab on us keyboards it's the back to key also has the tilde character on it if you do command and that key it simply switches between open windows for that app so here I can switch between the two pages Windows if I switch to one of the finder Windows here I can now switch between the two finder Windows now mission control is a tool I'm going to be talking about a lot from now on one of the things you can do with mission control that doesn't involve multiple desktops or spaces is you can trigger it to show you all of the windows in the current APP so the default keyboard shortcut is control and then down arrow and you can see since I was in Pages since Pages was the app that was running then I get both Pages Windows here it would show me all of them if I had 10 they would show me all 10. I also see recent documents here that are not currently opened and I can select one and it quickly brings that to the front so if I wanted to bring this to the front say maybe I couldn't see it very well and I didn't know where it was I could do control down arrow find it click and it will come to the front I could also do control and up arrow and that would show me all of the visible windows on the current desktop so now I see both Pages Windows here but I also see the finder windows I see the safari window and the notes window so I can pick whichever one I want to come to the front so click control up Arrow shows you everything click to bring the one you want to the front now those two keyboard shortcuts are in system settings under keyboard and then do keyboard shortcuts mission control and there's control up arrow and control down arrow mission control and application windows so if those aren't working for you make sure you have them set to this and both checked and this is true for other keyboard shortcuts here in mission control as well that we'll look at in a minute one more thing with Windows I want to show you if you ever want a window to take up exactly half of the screen you could do it here in Mac OS by going to window and see where it says tile hold the option key down and that changes to move so I can move this Pages document to the left side then I can select this Pages document hold the option key down and move this one to the right side and now they take up exactly half the screen of course if you want more options on how to tile Windows there are tons of third-party apps that will get you that now let's go on to look at stage manager which is a new multitasking technique added in Mac OS Ventura I have a whole video on this so I won't go into too much detail here but we'll turn it on by going into Control Center and turning on stage manager now you can see I've got my my pages Windows here that's what I had up front before but now I can click to switch to my two finder Windows click to switch to notes click to switch to Safari and with any of these I can still reposition the windows these are still independent Windows just like they are on a normal desktop the only difference is that some of these these four Windows now are hidden and I can reveal them by clicking here which automatically hides whatever windows I had before so now I can feel free to maybe have this window take up more space knowing that when I switch to Pages it will go away and then pages will show these two windows and you can group windows together in different ways for instance I can click and drag the top window off of the finder here and drag it to be part of this app set here so now you can see I've got three Windows two pages of Windows and a finder window here I can put them back in place like that I can click on the side here to go to anyone but I can also use all the other techniques like for instance I can command tab for the app switcher go to pages and that works if I want to minimize a window I can do that you can see how it minimizes right there back into Stage manager instead of into the dock if I'm using an app and I hide it with command H you can see now it's hidden just like you would expect it to be if I can use the app switcher to get it back so I can see stage manager doesn't change the fundamental nature of these windows they're still Windows you can still have them overlap you can click on one to bring it to the front click on the other to bring that to the front they're just now grouped together in sets and you see one set at a time an interesting technique you've got is if you go into system settings and then you go to desktop and Doc you go down to Stage manager and customize then you could turn on show windows from application one at a time so when you do that when you have an app set that has more than one window in it if you click it only one of those windows comes up the other one is still there on the left and you can kind of switch between them kind of a single Window mode so now you can kind of expand these if you want and easily switch between the two of them so stage answer Builds on top of the standard window multitasking so you can still use just about every tool that you could use before for instance I can go to window and switch to another window here I can do the same thing here in the dock switching to another window even if I'm in another app set here I can still go here switch to a window in this app set it brings that to the front when I'm in an app set I can use the windows switcher command and the back tick key to switch between the windows and if I take a window and group it together with this one so I've got a finder window and two pages windows I can now use command and back tick to go between all three of those windows even though they're from different apps now stage manager is new spaces also known as multiple desktops is something that's been around for a long while so the tool you're going to use for multiple desktops or spaces is Mission Control so I'm going to do control and up hour to go into mission control I see all the windows here and notice at the top it says desktop one if I move my pointer over it it shows desktop one there but I can click the plus button at the top right and now I've got desktop too so now I can move Windows to desktop 2 by simply dragging them so now I've got these two desktops I can click on one of them to go to it and now I can see I've got this Safari window and this Pages window here if I go back into mission control and then choose desktop one I've got the rest of my windows here the default keyboard shortcuts to go between these is control and then the right or left arrows so I can control right arrow to go over to this one Ctrl left Arrow to go back here and I could add a third desktop fourth desktop Etc so I should note too that there's some great trackpad gestures for controlling some of this if you go into system settings and then go to trackpad and then go to more gestures you'll see you can swipe between full screen applications or spaces with three or four fingers you can activate mission control with a swipe up of three or four fingers as well you can also turn on app Expose and have that go in One Direction or the other so if you'd rather use trackpad gestures instead of the keyboard shortcuts you can I could still use a lot of the same tools I had before so here I am with Pages as the front most window there if I go to window and switch to the other window it's going to take me to the desktop with that window on it the same thing if I use the dock here if I click and hold and then activate this window you can see it takes me to the desktop with that window on it if I do control down arrow for mission control for this mode here I can switch to the window that's on the other desktop I can also use stage manager with multiple desktops so here I've got two desktops if I go into this one and I turn on stage manager you'll see I've got two app sets over here and I'm using this one and I can switch between them like that if I go to the other desktop you can see I'm also using stage manager there I'm currently using this one Pages window here that I could switch that with the Safari window so when you're using stage manager you've got it on for all Desktop Windows however you can just simply have one app set on a desktop like I'll drag the Safari window here and now since I only have one app set there's no stage manager here on the left so this desktop behaves like a desktop without stage manager and this desktop behaves like one that is using it even though technically both are using stage manager now another part of this is full screen Windows so you've got a window like this and let's say I want to take that full screen I can click the green button here or hover over it and then choose enter full screen I can also go to view and then there's enter full screen usually the FN or Globe key and F when I do that this window will expand to be full screen so if I look at Mission Control now you'll see I've got two desktops and one called Pages this is not a desktop this is that window all by itself without a desktop so I go to that one and you can see how it takes up everything by default the menu bar is not there unless you move your pointer to the top the same with the dock at the bottom move your pointer there to get there though you can go into system settings and then desktop and Dock and then you'll see menu bar and you can set it to automatically hide and show the menu bar never and then you would see the menu bar all the time now full screen you could still use the window menu here to jump to the other window and back again you could do the same thing in the dock jump to another window and then jump to a full screen window and you can exit full screen mode by clicking on the green button again or wait and then use exit full screen or go to view and you'll see that exit full screen now uses the same keyboard shortcut and then that window returns to the desktop where it was before if I look at Mission Control it's just not there anymore so one way to multitask is to use full screen for everything and now I've got all of these windows full screen and I can do control right arrow and left Arrow to switch between them Ctrl up Arrow will bring me into mission control and I can select one and this mode is actually really useful and a lot of people like to work exclusively using just full screen Windows like this you can always rearrange things as well so let's go and bring these two pages windows together bring the Safari window here all the way to the left and bring the notes window next to it so now I've got these two finder Windows next to each other now in addition to full screen mode there's also a split view so if I were to hover over one of these green buttons here you can see tile window to the left or to the right by tile to the left it will allow me then to choose a window to the right so I can pick this Pages window here so now I've got a split view between these two it acts like full screen with the menu bar hidden and everything except that I have two apps instead of one I can even drag this middle line here somewhat it depends on the app and how much space the app needs whether you can adjust it so now if I go into mission control with control up Arrow you can see I've got desktop one but I have this one instead of full screen just saying finder or Pages it says finder and Pages it's got both of those right here I've got these two windows even though I still have a Pages window open on this desktop and a finder window here so all of the things I could do before like window and then switch to that window will take me there or go into the dock here and switch using the dock will take me to the right place when I go over here to split view I can use the green buttons right here and then exit split view with one of these like this I can click and you can see this goes back to a normal window and then the pages window was just left behind and is now a full screen app you can also do this in Mission Control by dragging so I can drag this Pages window over here it'll create a full screen version of it like I drag this files window to it to the left or to the right to make a split view and I could also exit split view for both of those by clicking here so there's one more major technique for multitasking and that's tabs so so far we've been dealing with multiple windows for an app so I have two pages Windows here but I could have both of these windows combined into one each using a tab now we're used to tabs in the browser so you've got a browser or window open here I could do command T create a new tab and go to a different page I can do command T and go to a third page and I've got three tabs open here I can't see more than one at a time but it sure is convenient to have all three of these open maybe showing some information I need switch to one switch to another it's a great multitasking technique even though things aren't visible at the same time but you can do the same thing using other apps so for instance here in Pages I've got these two windows open I can go to window and merge all windows and it will put those in tabs and I can break them off by grabbing the tab and dragging out of the window like that so having tabs is a great way to clean things up a bit notice here in the finder I can also have multiple tabs there's even the little plus button here to create a new finder Tab and I've got two tabs here in the finder so makes it a little nicer to have these two here then have two windows open like that most Mac apps that deal with multiple windows can use tabs and a lot of third-party apps as well and in Safari you even have advanced tab functionality you could go and turn the sidebar on here and you can see you can have tab groups so I've done videos on Tab groups before so not only can you have tabs but you can group them together and switch between those groups you can only do that in Safari though there are no tab groups and other apps now you can use tabs in conjunction with all the other tools I just showed you so for instance if I wanted to switch to the pages window but a particular tab in that Pages window I can click here in the dock and I can select that and you can see it brings the window to the front and activates that tab I can use the window menu here as well and it will go to the right tab you could use stage manager with these tabs as well so I'll turn stage manager back on and you can see this one tabbed Pages window works perfectly fine here in stage manager the same thing with this finder window here too and the Safari window so I can combine tabs with Stage manager it of course Works in multiple desktops as well so I can create a new desktop here bring the pages window over here and I've got the pages window with two tabs there I've got the rest of my windows here on this other desktop if I were to take this full screen notice how I've got tabs here in full screen and if I were to go into mission control and say bring Safari over here as split view notice split view also can use tabs so I've got the Safari window with three tabs and this Pages window with two tabs all working within the multiple desk tops and spaces using mission control so as you can see there's a huge variety of multitasking tools for Mac users it's hard to remember them all and it's hard to remember how they all interact with each other but you don't have to you just have to figure out which ones you like and stick to those if you like to put everything in full screen apps do that if you want everything is just different windows on One desktop just do that if you like the new stage manager you can use that you can combine two or three of those but usually somebody wouldn't use all of these at once it would just stick to the ones you like best hope you found this useful thanks for watching [Music] if you like this video click the Thumbs Up Button below to let me know I publish new tutorials each weekday hit the Subscribe button so you don't miss out

Channel: macmostvideo

Views: 35,676

Keywords: mac multitasking, macos multitasking, mac ventura multitasking, macos ventura multitasking

Id: TEsXQunTcE0

Length: 19min 44sec (1184 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 10 2022