Mac tips: Take full control of your windows
By Alan Stonebridge
The Mission Control feature in macOS, which gives you an instant overview of windows that are open and the ability to organise them across multiple workspaces, harbours some helpful hidden extras.
If you intend to use two apps side by side in Split View, there’s a superfast way to do it. Drag a window to the top edge of the desktop and Mission Control will open, with the Spaces bar already expanded. Drop the window in an empty area on that bar, then drag another window from the main area below over the thumbnail for the full-screen workspace you just created.
Choose your side
Before you drop the window into Split View, move the pointer between the thumbnail’s left and right halves. You’ll see the + graphic that’s overlaid on the thumbnail follows the pointer between the halves, meaning you can choose which side of the screen the window will fill when you drop it.
Multiple workspaces across multiple displays
Windows aren’t the only thing you can move between workspaces and displays in Mission Control. In fact, you can drag a whole workspace thumbnail from the Spaces bar on one display to another.
This is handy when you’ve been working with multiple workspaces while only your portable Mac’s internal display was available, but want to take advantage of a second display when you arrive at your office, say. With a single drag-and-drop action, apps you were swiping between on one screen are easily made visible simultaneously on adjacent displays.
When window previews are too small
This tip is something Apple made clear way back in the days of Exposé, an earlier incarnation of Mission Control from the early 2000s, but if you’re new to the Mac it’s easy not to realise it’s possible.
To take a closer look at a window’s contents, place the pointer over the window and press the spacebar to make it larger.
Not the window you want? Either press the spacebar again or click outside of it to shrink it down again. You’ll remain in Mission Control, ready to apply this trick to another window to find the one you actually want.
(Note: this capability is also available in Finder: select one or more files, then press the spacebar to open a Quick Look window for them. Usually, you’ll then be able to inspect the files contents’ more closely, though it depends on the types of the files.)
Check the contents of a space
Whether you’re at the desktop proper or in Mission Control, swipe four fingers on your trackpad or two on your Magic Mouse, horizontally, to jump between workspaces. (Keyboard lover? Press Ctrl+Left arrow or Ctrl+Right arrow instead.)
Moving between spaces this way happens so rapidly that, if you have just two or three workspaces and know where the desired window is placed, you’ll rarely need to use Mission Control’s Spaces bar to move between them. By the time you do that, you could have already swiped your way to the correct place.
An alternative way to jump to a workspace
Swiping between spaces on the desktop doesn’t help if the window you want is tucked behind another — a key reason you might still enter Mission Control, of course. You can use the same gestures/key combos in Mission Control, too. However, if you’ve created more than a few workspaces, this navigation method gets inefficient.
Instead, move the pointer to the top of Mission Control to expand the Spaces bar. Simply clicking one of the thumbnails switches you to the corresponding space. But if you hold Alt/Option when you click, the main area switches to that workspace’s contents, but you’ll remain in Mission Control.
Animation motion sickness
If animations when you enter and move around in Mission Control make you nauseous, give this a go: Open System Preferences, click Accessibility, select Display on the left and then tick the ‘Reduce motion’ checkbox to turn off these and many other transitions in macOS. Many are replaced with simpler crossfades.
