Stage Manager & Mission Control - Helpful features on your Mac to help you manage multiple Apps!

welcome back everyone my name is Joel Feld and today I wanted to make your life a little bit easier with teaching you how to use stage manager mission control and some other shortcuts to help you multitask and manage all of the crazy windows that you probably have open on your Mac here we go [Music] [Music] if you're like me you probably have multiple windows open that are all stacked on top of one another and you have your email and a web browser and music or Spotify you just probably have a whole bunch going on and more times than not it can get a little overwhelming and frustrating to have all of these tools and applications open so there's some cool features on the Mac that are built in that allow you to simplify and keep things organized automatically there's a feature called stage manager that allows you to easily manipulate the windows and the applications hide things and show things when you need them so you can focus primarily on your task at hand so first I want to create a scenario of a typical work experience I'm going to go ahead and open up Safari Apple photos we'll just do apple.com here open up Pages music and I'll open up calendar which calendar is crazy all of these windows are stacked on top of each other so what you end up doing is kind of moving them around and they get shuffled and in the top left you can minimize it and that goes down to your dock which is fine but overall it can be a little frustrating because there's a lot of things that get stacked on top of one another and you kind of lose that momentum or that that productivity and Stage manager allows you to focus on the one thing that you're trying to do in order to use it though we need to turn it on so let's go ahead and go to the apple on the top left choose system preferences if you're like me this new operating system makes it a little challenging to find all the stuff that you're looking for so I use the search in the top left so I'm going to start to type in stage and here we have under desktop and Doc stage manager so that means that if we scroll down to desktop and dock here we have stage manager so I'm going to go ahead and toggle this on now as soon as I did that notice all of those windows just shot to the side they got out of the way because I'm focused on this one particular app system settings if I come over here to the left hand side I can hover over any of these icons if I click on one it automatically switches spots so now I'm focused on Apple photos and everything is over there to the left hand side I can still see all of the apps so if I click on calendar if I click on Safari they just kind of swap the space so that nothing is layered on top of one another now let's go back to system settings because there is an option to customize a little bit not much but there are some custom options this first option allows you to show the recent applications if you toggle this all you have to do is move your cursor to the left hand side and they kind of pop out so you get a little bit more screen real estate let's toggle that back on the other option is to hide or show things on your desktop so notice right now it's not showing anything on the desktop so if we turn this on we see everything on the desktop I actually like to turn that off because if I click on the desktop I can see the desktop and everything goes away and I see everything that's on there let's go back to system settings the last option that you can customize is to show the windows from an application what this means is you have two choices either all at once or one at a time all at once means let's do this with Safari so if I open up Safari and create a new window so we'll do new window and we'll just do Amazon we'll do another window we'll do YouTube okay so we have three different web pages right here if I go back notice how everything hid there to the left if I just scoot my cursor all the way to the left hand side it pops right out I'll click on the system settings go back to customize so notice show window from an application it's doing it all at once so it showed us the three safari windows all laid on top of one another but if we change this option to one at a time now when we click on Safari the two over there stay and I can click and click and click to toggle through them and now they're not overlapping on one another so I can focus just on one page I can still have multiple tabs within one particular window but if I have multiple windows open they're over here on the left hand side now here's a nice little shortcut if I hold down shift on the keyboard and click on Safari it actually brings all of those windows towards me so now they're all here again if I click back on the desktop they all go back click once on it they all come forward again now if I hold down shift on the keyboard again and click on the top in this gray area it just kind of tucks those other windows back where it belongs and now they've swapped spaces again so here is Apple here's YouTube there's Amazon so if I hold down shift on the keyboard click on it again it brings up that other window click it on a third time now I have all three safari windows layered on one another so nice little shortcut if you want to keep that option on for once at a time I prefer all at once just because if I have multi multiple documents multiple Word documents or multiple windows of safari I like to be able to see them all the time because usually I'm toggling between the two or comparing something so I'm going to leave that at all at once now the other options for stage manager you can make it appear in the top right to turn it on or off so notice in the top right here in the menu bar I have the ability to either toggle on or off stage manager this also gives you a quick option to get to Stage manager settings directly from the menu bar as well but you may not have stage manager up here unless you add it to the menu bar so if we go back to system settings we're going to go to control center on the left and over here we can choose under stage manager to show in menu bar by default it's probably set to don't show in menu bar so notice how it disappeared in the top right so we're going to select this choose show in menu bar and now it shows if you keep on scrolling down there's another option if you have control center in the top right right you have stage manager directly from here also I typically put the button up here for stage manager because it's a one-click access rather than going to control center and then stage manager I like it being at the top but there's also another keyboard shortcut if I hold down option on the keyboard and just click on it it's another shortcut where I don't have to click on the menu and then select it I just hold down option click on it and it toggles it off and on for me exactly like going to the little switch here stage manager allows you to multitask and really focus on one particular app at a time for those of you who don't like stage manager there are other options that are able to make life easier on your computer especially if you have a laptop and primarily this is the main reason I don't use a mouse I don't use a mouse at all I don't use an external Mouse for video editing for my photography literally nothing because the trackpad if you learn this trackpad on your laptop it far exceeds the standard Mouse with all of your options and the ability to multitask so let me show you a few things that are extremely helpful let's start off by turning off stage manager so we're going to go up to the top right turn off stage manager and we're back to square one with a bunch of applications open but they're all stacked on one another so here we are with all of these things and this probably looks common because you're moving windows and it makes it really hard and often you throw one way down here and then you can't find it and you spend 10 minutes being frustrated because you don't know where anything's at so there's a feature called mission control that allows you to multitask with these windows so let me show you how that works if I take three fingers and I swipe up on the keyboard it spreads everything out so you're getting a nice bird's eye view of all of the applications that are open if I move my cursor on top of any of these icons or any of these windows when I click on it it becomes the primary focus so three fingers up spreads everything out oh cool I want to go to to my music I'll click on that that now comes forward for me it alleviates the reason to move all of the windows around which I know you hate doing we all do now you'll also notice that when I did three fingers upwards notice up at the top here you have desktop one and desktop two and let's let me do that again if you move your cursor all the way towards the top of the screen notice how it pops down you can actually have multiple virtual desktops so imagine having a whole bunch of monitors lined up next to your laptop but instead of a physical monitor they're just digital monitors because the way this works is over on the far right hand side I can click this plus sign and it's going to add a third desktop for me let's add just a fourth one and why not we'll do a fifth what this means is I can drag this application to that window I can drag this application to that window oh there it goes this was the one in the very far bottom so three fingers up again let's go back to desktop one three fingers up again so here we're gonna put music in desktop 5. Safari is in desktop for I should say Amazon the YouTube is in desktop three I have notes on desktop too and let's say that I want the calendar to be on another one and I can actually just drag this up and it will create a whole calendar full screen view for me right there now what's neat about this is anytime I do three fingers up I'm always able to click amongst these desktop options in the top and it takes me to that desktop if I do three fingers up I can go to desktop number two three fingers up I can go to desktop number three so on and so forth now if I take three fingers and swipe to the left it takes me to the next desktop swipe to the left again it takes me there so this gives you the ability to kind of move your windows around and have it full potential of the screen and not have to worry about different Windows stacked on top of one another it makes it really really convenient for multitasking taking this a step further you can even assign different applications to a particular desktop window for example if I always wanted these five desktops plus the calendar at full screen to be there all the time time I can say I want to dedicate desktop number three to Safari and always open up in desktop 3 for Safari so if I click on desktop 3 and I go down to the dock if I right click on Safari and go to options I have this Choice down here at the bottom to say assign to either all desktops this desktop or nothing so all desktops means that if I now switch amongst all of the desktops using three fingers to go left and right it's always going to have that Safari window in every single desktop so it kind of defeats the whole purpose of what I'm trying to do now if I go back to desktop 3 and I right click again on Safari we go to options and choose this desktop so now Safari is not going to show up in any other desktop in fact if I go back to Safari here let's quit out of safari let's go to desktop number five let's open up Safari and you'll notice it actually switched us out of that other virtual desktop and brought us right back to desktop number three where this is at where we told Safari to be for that space what else is nice is anytime you create a new desktop up there it always uses the current desktop wallpaper but you can actually change that for example if I go to desktop 6 here we could go to photos actually let's bring photos to desktop four it doesn't matter I'm just going to bring out a photograph Let's do let's go to my shared Library here all right we'll use this picture of the overview of San Francisco so I'm going to go to the top right and do set wallpaper and it sets this virtual desktop as the wallpaper so now when I go back up notice the other ones still have the bow and arrow Cupid's bow I believe it's called and now this one has the city overview or the skyline or whatever you want to call it so it makes it really nice to distinguish also visually what desktop you're in because then you can kind of correlate that say oh this is the background picture of the graffiti so I know that mail is going to pop up in that window now at any given time if you want to get rid of some of these desktops you can just hover your cursor over the top and there's going to be a little X in the top left and if I click that it just gets rid of that desktop completely if I hold down option on the keyboard I can now have X's across all of them and I can just go through and get rid of all of them and I'm left back with my main desktop and the full screen calendar and if I click on that that button it brings it out of full screen and it brings it back as a native natural window under the very first desktop so it's really really convenient to utilize Mission Control in all of these virtual desktops because it makes your life so much easier and what I like to do especially for the finder I prefer to right click and have options for for the finder to show up in all desktops because naturally the finder is all of your files and folders and you don't really want to go hunting or assign that to a particular desktop you always want that available because chances are if you're going to the finder you're looking for something so I usually keep this on to be assigned to all desktops that way when I swipe amongst all of these virtual desktops I'm always going to see that finder window in every single desktop pretty cool huh now the last thing actually you can assign keyboard shortcuts to this as well so if we go back to system settings if you don't have a trackpad or you don't want to use the trackpad if you do want to use a mouse you can still take advantage of all of these features the stage manager the mission control if you go down to keyboard on the left hand side and choose keyboard shortcuts this window let's minimize some of this get out of the craziness here you have the ability to assign or look at to find now what keyboard shortcuts are for all of these features if we go to Mission Control you'll notice that to initiate Mission Control it's control on the keyboard with the up Arrow so now when I do that notice how it brought the desktop one and desktop 2 so it brought those down for me other options uh turn stage manager on and off this one actually I don't think had one I assigned it to be F1 so now if I do F1 notice the desktop hid and if I click on the desktop settings goes over there on the left so Function One turns it on and off and then underneath that if I untoggle Mission Control move left to space move right a space switch to desktop one switch to desktop two desktop three so on and so forth so here it's saying if I want to go to the right I'll do control and then right arrow and it takes me to the next virtual desktop right arrow again left Arrow left Arrow if I do control 2 it's going to just jumped me to a particular one that I can go to that's why I love using the trackpad because everything is a finger gesture I can do three fingers two fingers four fingers one finger all of that and if you're not familiar with your trackpad get to know it in the system settings if you go to trackpad down at the bottom it actually shows you a whole bunch of little animations here to teach you how your trackpad actually works and the biggest thing I think is the whole concept of right clicking on the Mac that you actually don't call it right click they call it secondary click why I don't know that's just what they do this whole trackpad can be one giant button or it can be two buttons what you need to do is in this very first point and click category notice secondary click click with two fingers is going to initiate that right click or secondary click so if I click here with two fingers on the desktop it's going to give me that secondary menu to allow me to create a new folder change wallpaper all that kind of stuff now if I change this from chain click with two fingers I could say click and bottom right corner that way when I click in the bottom right corner of the track pad it's actually doing the right click if I click anywhere else it's not doing it I have to go to the bottom right and then it does it same thing with the left corner if I choose the right corner now it doesn't do it I need to go to the left side to initiate the right click so I prefer to do two fingers and I would highly suggest to kind of go through these options and as you hover your cursor over there it's going to give you a little animation at the top to show you a little preview of what that feature or gesture does and this is also where I have the ability for Mission Control swipe up with three fingers well I could change that to swipe up with four fingers so now three fingers doesn't do anything I need to take four fingers and go go up and now it does mission control I will say that when you're getting used to the track head don't keep your fingers so close together otherwise it's going to think you have one giant finger it may not recognize it as three individual points on the track pad so just do three fingers kind of spread them out a little bit so overall that is stage manager and Mission Control there's all sorts of other ways to multitask on your Mac but these are two of the main ones that I personally use that I think are extremely helpful for any advanced user any beginner user on your Mac or pretty much any user on your Mac so if you don't like the trackpad I highly encourage you to give it a shot take away your mouse for a week or two and force yourself to use this because I guarantee it you will probably love it so thank you so much for watching if you enjoyed what you saw go ahead hit that like button if you want to support me in my channel go ahead hit that thanks button below and if you learned something new go ahead hit that subscribe tap that little bell and we'll see you next time

Channel: Learn with Joel Feld

Views: 61,645

Keywords: apple, ipad, iphone, learn, Apple tutorials, iOS, iCloud, stage manager, mission control, right click mac, right click, multi-tasking, multitask, trackpad, trackpad on mac, how to use spaces, spaces, how to multitask on mac, best features of a mac, multiple windows on mac, secondary click, how to use stage manager macos, macOS ventura features

Id: 5Em76-OkRxw

Length: 18min 48sec (1128 seconds)

Published: Fri May 12 2023