Where is spaces on my mac

Create an account. Edit this Article. We use cookies to make wikiHow great. By using our site, you agree to our cookie policy. Cookie Settings. Learn why people trust wikiHow. Download Article Explore this Article methods. Tips and Warnings. Related Articles. Method 1. Open Mission Control. In order to begin to understand how the concept of Spaces works, you'll need to open the Mission Control screen.

This shows you the spaces you have active—each of the numbered desktops at the top of the screen represents a space. There are three different ways to access Mission Control: Press the "F3" key.

Click on the "Mission Control" icon on your dock. If you have a trackpad, push upwards on the pad with three fingers. Arrange active programs. To move an active program to its own space, simply drag it with the mouse and drop it on the chosen space. To open up an additional desktop space from Mission Control, move your mouse towards the top-right of the screen.

Click it, and an additional space will open, up to the total limit of 16 spaces. Click on a space to leave Mission Control. When you click on a space, Mission Control will disappear and your display will show only the space you selected. Method 2. Use the trackpad. To switch between spaces on a Mac with a trackpad, swipe left or right on the pad with a four-fingered gesture. This will cycle you through the open spaces in your chosen direction. Even Apple seems to have forgotten this feature as it received no updates at all for macOS Mojave — at least no visible ones — and unfortunately it has call to be updated.

Right now certain elements feel oddly unfinished and others are downright confusing. Yet when you know what this feature is supposed to do and you know how to work around its oddities, Spaces can be a boon. Take the time to explore it now and you'll either be amazed — or at least able to tell people what this odd corner of the Mac is all about.

The first thing you ever see when you start up your Mac is its desktop. And that may be the last you see of it too as you then immediately fill the desktop with icons. The only thing stopping you becoming overwhelmed with all the icons on the desktop is that you also immediately fill the screen with apps and documents that completely obliterate all sight of it. It all becomes a mess and one that means you often spend longer looking for the window or the icon you want than you ever should on a computer that's meant to be easy to use.

The new Stacks feature will help with the icons as it neatly organizes them into groups but that doesn't help with all the open documents and windows.

Spaces is a feature that gives you another desktop. Leave all the clutter where it is and start afresh with a new desktop that's empty of icons and windows. Then if you fill that one up, Spaces can give you another. And another. You can have up to 16 different desktops on your Mac. Each with your choice of windows open and even each with their own desktop wallpaper. The idea is not that you can then open a hundred apps and have a thousand document windows filling them all up.

It's that you can get more organized. If you work all day at a Mac then it's unlikely you're spending all that time in a single application. You may have been hired to work solely in Excel but you're going to be getting emails every five minutes too. Maybe you're a project planner working in OmniPlan : you may need to check Safari to look up building regulations in your state.

And whatever you need to do, you surely also want to take the occasional minute to read the news or check in on social media. What Spaces lets you do is divide all of this up. Make it look so that your Mac is solely showing you Excel. Make it look as if the only thing you have open is Pages.

Then when you need to and only when you need to, you can flip over to another desktop, another Space. As soon as you do that, it looks like your Mac solely has Mail open. Or Facebook.

Or your calendar. Whatever it needs to be, it's occupying your Mac's screen so that you can concentrate on it. And you can exclude all other apps from your attention. You've already thought that this is away to flip from Twitter to Microsoft Word whenever you hear your boss coming but we didn't say that.

It is, though. Spaces works. It is an aid to concentration and productivity because it helps you compartmentalize. That's about more than just having one different app in each Space, it's about separating the types of work you do. You can group related apps together into a Space. Say your work for the HR department needs you to use figures from a Numbers spreadsheet and create a Keynote presentation.

Have one Space that has just Numbers and Keynote in it. Then have another space that's got Mail and your Calendar. A third that's got Pages, your To Do app, iTunes and anything else. Where it falls down a little is in how you set all of these up and how you move apps between Spaces.

Once you've got it the way you want, flipping from Space to Space is extremely easy. If you have a trackpad, swipe upwards with four fingers. This gets you the Mac's Expose feature where windows from every open application are shown to you in thumbnails. However, at the very top of the screen lies the Spaces feature.

At first, you'll just see a row of text labels. In fact, if you've never used Spaces before then you'll see just one text label and it will say Desktop. Move your cursor upwards and that one text label will turn into a thumbnail image of your desktop.

And in the top right corner of your Mac's screen there will be a plus symbol. As you move your cursor toward that, it changes to a plus in front of a small image of a desktop. Click on the plus sign and that small image slides out to join the thumbnail of your current desktop. You've now got two thumbnails, one renamed Desktop 1 and the other Desktop 2.

Click on Desktop 2 and you're in that new desktop. Any apps you had open before will appear to be gone and you can start working on something else. Any app you open while you're in this Space will open its windows on this desktop. To move back and forth between the two desktops, you can call up the menu bar Spaces feature with a four-finger swipe up.

Or you can press Control and the up arrow. This gesture and that command always work because they always get Expose which includes Spaces. When you have more than one Space created, though, you get more possibilities. You can then take four fingers and swipe them left or right to move immediately to a Space without going through Expose. When you're in Desktop 2, you can four-finger swipe from left to right across your trackpad and now you're on Desktop 1 and vice versa.

Similarly, you can hold the Control key and tap the left or right arrow to do the same thing. If you're not sure what space you're in, call up the menu bar Spaces feature and it will show you: the current space is highlighted. Then you can also switch between spaces with a keystroke: Control and 1 takes you to Desktop 1, Control and 2 to Desktop 2 and so on.

You can move to any of your first 10 spaces this way: to get to 10 you press Control If this isn't working for you, check System Preferences , Keyboard , Shortcuts. Select Mission Control and you will see that some or all Spaces shortcuts have been unchecked.

Unless you're using those Control plus digit keystrokes for other functions such as launching Keyboard Maestro actions then switch them all on. Speaking of Keyboard Maestro, though, there is one missing feature in Spaces that we'd so very much like addressed. Right now it's not possible for this or any other Mac automation app to control Spaces for you. It would be great to be able to tap a key and send Microsoft Word off to Desktop 3 while we continue in Desktop 1 but Apple doesn't grant that facility to apps.

Desktop on Display [ number ] : The app opens in the current space on a specific display if more than one display is available. By default, when switching to an app, the desktop automatically switches to a space that has open windows for the app. For example, if you create a new TextEdit document in Desktop 3, but TextEdit windows are already open in Desktop 2, your new document opens in Desktop 2.

Open Mission Control preferences for me. On your Mac, enter Mission Control , then move the pointer to the top edge of the screen. In the Spaces bar, move the pointer over the space you want to delete, then click the Delete button that appears. You can quickly stop using an app in full screen or Split View by moving the pointer over the thumbnail in the Space bar, then clicking the Exit button that appears.

Create a space On your Mac, enter Mission Control. You can create up to 16 spaces. Move between spaces On your Mac, do any of the following: On a trackpad, swipe left or right with three or four fingers.

Press the Control key and the Right or Left arrow key.