The Comprehensive Guide To Mac Stage Manager

hi this is Gary with macmost.com let's take an in-depth look at using stage manager on your Mac [Music] most is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than a thousand people go to macmost.com patreon there you could read more about the patreon campaign join us to get exclusive content and course discounts so stage manager is probably the most visible new feature in Mac OS Ventura it's a whole new way to do multitasking on your Mac so here's the problem that stage manager solves I've got a whole bunch of Windows here open and it's hard to navigate and get to each one if I use Mission Control Ctrl up Arrow you can see I've got a total of 11 windows open here so it would seem to be impossible to really manage these without having to go to multiple spaces or hide a bunch of the apps or minimize a bunch of the windows but with Stage manager I can so I'm going to go to the control center and click the stage manager button to turn on stage manager and when I do that you're going to see all of these groups of Windows on the left and on the right you're only going to see one single app at each group of windows these are called app sets or at least Apple calls them app sets in one particular document so let's go with that and you can click on one of those to switch to a different app set so here is notes and it's just this one window here and it's a regular window but it's grouped as an app set and I can switch to another one like this calendar one and you can see how notes goes into the slot here on the left that was used by calendar before and I could switch to photos here and the photos app window comes to the front and the calendar one goes down here I could switch to pages and I have a bunch of different Windows here and Pages I've got three different windows and they all come here and I can use those so what's actually happening here is all the windows are still there if I use mission control control F or I can still see them all it's just now everything but what's in one app set is on the left and the one app set in this case these three pages windows or in this case this one notes window that is taking up the rest of the screen they're actually more app sets than you can see here it'll only present as many as you have space for so I see four right here but the windows are still there this this counter window is still there it's just really small and off to the side and easy for me to switch to it now you don't need this left side list at all as a matter of fact if you move a window over to the left enough it will shoot that away and you can use the entire space here for your windows you can go with a pointer all the way to the left side of the screen and they'll pop out and then you can select one and jump to that or you can just permanently hide them off you go into system settings and then two desktop and Dock and scroll down you'll see stage manager and a button for customize you go into that and you can turn off recent apps this is the list of recent app sets and now that's gone so now I still have app sets but I'm just not going to see the list on the left unless I move my pointer over to it now note you don't have to use that left list at all to switch to something you can use the standard techniques like I can use app switcher I'll use command Tab and switch to notes and this will switch the app set that I'm looking at you could also just use the docsa and switch to an app that way some other standard ways of switching apps are still there and you can certainly use those so I put this list here in place and it appears that you always have to have one app set over here on the right and then the rest are listed here but in fact if you click on the desktop you'll find that they all go to the left so I have no app set active right now as a bonus I get my desktop back notice here I can see the icons here on the desktop just like normal but if I'm in an app set they're not there all of that goes away so the desktop becomes just the wallpaper background not the actual files or other icons anymore you can actually turn this off as well if you go back into system settings and back here in the settings there's desktop items turn that switch on and now the desktop acts like it did before you have your files there even when you're using Windows but you lose the functionality of being able to click on the desktop and have the current APP set go away there's always going to be an active app set now you can regroup the windows here in these app sets which probably makes a name like Windows sets better than app sets let's say for instance I want to have notes and calendar both together I don't have to switch to see them I want to see them next to each other I could drag calendar out and move it here and now I can arrange these as I like now when I go to another app set like reminders here notice now notes and calendar stay together you can even see the two app icons and the two windows there and if I switch back to it I not only get those back but it remembers the window positions you can also take them out of this mode by dragging back here so I can put reminders back and I could have two windows from the same app in different app sets so switching back to Safari here I've got several different Windows I'm going to bring one of these to the front the one I want to move somewhere else then I'm going to go to the other app set let's say the one that just has notes in here then I'm going to drag the top window from Safari here so now you can see I've got one app set with notes and one Safari window and one app set that has three safari windows in it and these little app icons are good for more than just telling what type of windows are in there if I click on them like I'll click on the Safari one here I'm going to get to see all of the different safari windows spread out including the one that's part of another app set so I could switch to this one for instance and now I'm in that app set now the dock down here stays there if you have a visible at the time it'll be visible when you're using Sage manager if you don't then it will appear when you move the pointer to the bottom like I just had it do so I can launch new apps and switch to different apps using the dock just like before it just works within this new stage manager interface I can use app switching to move to another app and then it will take me to the app set if I go into Launchpad I can use Launchpad to go into an app or to launch a different app like that you can see now this is in its own app set as well you can also hide apps so I'm going to hide the reminders app with command H or you could use reminders and hide reminders and now it's not listed anymore here but it's hidden just like a normal hidden app I can go back to it and it will reappear here and then appear here on the left side when I'm switching to another app set now in addition to the app switcher command and tab there's the window switcher which switches between Windows and the same app that's command and the backtick key the key above tab here's the interesting thing in stage manager that now works between Windows in the same app set not the same app anymore so here I am in Safari high of three different Windows here and a fourth one and another app set if I do command and backtick I'm only going between these three windows in the current app set if I go here I have an app set that has a safari window and a notes window and if I use command and backtick it goes between those two minimize also works differently normally if I would minimize this would go into the dock but if I'm using stage manager minimize actually puts that window back into the left side it's part of the same app set but it only shows one there because the other two are here I can minimize this one as well and notice it goes back in there and I could click to take them back out in the same order they went in it even remembers this so I can go and minimize these two to the left side I just have this one window I can switch to reminders switch back to this app set and it remembers I only have this one here these two are minimized I can bring them back out there's another setting you should know about and that is show windows from an app all at once or one at a time so if you switch to one at a time now if I go to look at the safari windows I click there and it shows one the one on the top if I click again it shows the next one and it shuffles through them only show me one at a time if I go to this app set though it shows me that two windows from different apps together so it's only when you have an app set that has Windows from the same app that it does this Behavior now this works with multiple desktop spaces and Mission Control so I'm going to do control up arrow and I see all these windows I've got here and one desktop let's add another desktop and let's drag a few Windows to it so this one and this one and the photos app there maybe a calculator there as well now let's go back to desktop one so now I see stage manager still working like it did before I can still switch between these but if I use control right arrow for Mission Control I go to my other desktop space and I see there are four app sets here here's one Safari window and there's one Pages window here's photos and here's calculator so these are treated as two different desktops with different stage manager app sets and using multiple screens works the same way so if these were two different screens hooked up to the same Mac each screen would have its own stage manager with its own set of app sets on it and you could actually drag and drop Windows between the screens to move them from one to the other now one thing I know it's going to be asked about a lot is is there a keyboard shortcut to turn stage manager on and off and there isn't I think the idea here is to turn it on and leave it on or turn it off and leave it off switching back and forth is going to be kind of really confusing so maybe that's why apple is kind of holding back from having a keyboard shortcut but you can make it easier to switch instead of going here to control center and having to click this button you could drag this button out and put it there in the menu bar as its own icon now when you click on it you get the stage manager switch so you really don't save any time here except that you do get a handy way to get to Stage manager settings and also there's a trick if you option click it will turn stage manager off and on again now stage manager isn't going to be for everyone it's just another way to do multitasking if you're used to using say multiple desktops with mission control or just having lots of Windows and navigating around with the app switcher and window switcher well then you can keep using those you certainly don't have to switch to Stage manager but if you do want to try it what I encourage you to do is try it for a few days don't expect in 15 minutes for it to convert you from how you've done it for years to this new method it takes them getting used to but I think for a lot of people it's actually going to end up being a better method especially if you're doing all your work on one smaller screen like a Macbook for instance and also keep in mind that stage manager is for the iPad as well as the Mac the iPad doesn't have all that stuff it doesn't have windowed apps it doesn't have mission control it doesn't have the ability to hide and minimize and do all that stuff so for the iPad it may be the ideal way to do multitasking and if you have both a Mac and an iPad it may be great to be able to use the same type of multitasking on both so I hope you found all 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: 139,544

Keywords: stage manager, macos ventura, ventura tips and tricks, new macos ventura, ventura stage manager, macos ventura stage manager, stage manager macos

Id: dbndfDB6EEA

Length: 12min 9sec (729 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 25 2022