4/5/239:00 am 13 Tips for Using Full Screen Mode on Your Mac Many people just switch to Full Screen mode when in an app without realizing how it works or what options are available. Learn how to better understand and control Full Screen windows on your Mac. You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads). Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here's some tips for using Full Screen Mode on your Mac. MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than 1000 supporters. Go to MacMost.com/patreon. There you can read more about the Patreon Campaign. Join us and get exclusive content and course discounts. So Full Screen Mode is a great way to focus on just one thing at a time on your Mac. Now on your Mac you always have available to you multiple desktop spaces. Sometimes these are just called Desktops. Sometimes Spaces. I'll call them Desktop Spaces for clarity. Now you are using them whether you like it or not. You may just be using one single desktop space with all of your windows, like these three windows here, just on that one space. If you take a window into Full Screen Mode by clicking the green button here or using View, and then Enter Full Screen, then what you're doing is actually creating another Desktop Space. You could see this by going into Mission Control. I'll use Control and Up Arrow to do that. I've got my regular desktop here and I've got that window now occupying its own space. You can think of this as a Desktop Space and this as a Full Screen Window space. But the important thing to note is that this Safari window is in its own space and not on the same space any longer with the Pages windows which are on Desktop 1. Then when you exit Full Screen Mode then this window goes back to Desktop 1. Now you just have this single Desktop Space again. Now when you do have a window in Full Screen Mode, like this, you can switch back to the other desktop like I showed you using Mission Control. So Control Up Arrow takes you to Mission Control and you can click on Desktop 1 to go there. You can also do Control Up Arrow to go back into Mission Control and then go to your Full Screen Window. If you take another window Full Screen, like I'll take this Pages window Full Screen, you can now see in Mission Control I've got my Desktop Space and then a Full Screen Pages space and a Full Screen Safari space. I can use Mission Control to navigate to anyone that I want. Now another way to get between these spaces is to use Control and then Right Arrow to move over to the right. Then Left Arrow to move to the left. This helps you navigate these three spaces without having to go to this Mission Control interface first. Now, if those keyboard shortcuts aren't working, perhaps you changed them. You can customize them by going to System Settings and then going to Keyboard. Then to Keyboard Shortcuts. Then here if you go to Mission Control you'll see the control up arrow for Mission Control and then if you reveal the Mission Control shortcuts here you can see they move left and move right as Control Left and Control Right. You can change these to something else if you want. Now you also have Trackpad gestures for this. So if you go to System Settings, Trackpad and then you go to More Gestures you see that you can swipe between full screen applications using the Swipe Left or Right with three fingers or four fingers. Note that although the trackpad settings call this Swipe Between Full Screen Applications it is actually swiping between any Desktop Space. In addition, Mission Control also has a keyboard shortcut. You can swipe up with 3 fingers or 4 fingers. You may wonder about the order here. If I go to Mission Control you can see Desktop 1 is first, then Pages, and then Safari. If you go into System Settings and then to Desktop & Dock there's a section for Mission Control here. If you have automatically rearranged spaces based on most recent use, if I go using the App Switcher to Safari notice that in Mission Control Safari is the second Desktop Space. But if I use the App Switcher and go to Pages and then go back to this first Desktop here, notice now that Pages is the second space. They switch positions because of this setting. If you would rather have all your Desktop Spaces stay at the same location then you should turn this Off. Now it is important to understand Full Screen Mode is not really a full screen app. It's often called that. You often say that you're using an app in Full Screen Mode or this is a Full Screen App. That is not true! For instance, here I've got a Pages window but notice I also have a Full Screen Desktop Space for Pages. What's going on here is this is one window here on Desktop 1 and the second window is here in Full Screen Mode. So it is the window, not the app, that goes into Full Screen Mode. Even here with Safari it just happens to be the only Safari window that is open. But in Safari, if I go to New Window, you can see it actually creates a new Full Screen Desktop Space here keeping in the same mode since I started that on a Full Screen window. So I've got two separate windows here in Safari, both Full Screen Mode. I can take this one out of Full Screen Mode. So now we've got Safari and Pages with windows here on Desktop 1. Then over to the right I've got one Pages window in Full Screen Mode and then I've got a Safari window in Full Screen Mode. Like this. Now a lot of times people go to Full Screen Mode just because they want this window to be as large as possible. But they don't necessarily want to take the window away from the Desktop and away from other windows that may be there. To do that, instead of clicking the green button hold the Option Key down. Then choose Zoom. Or under Window you can choose Zoom right here. But what this does though is it takes the window to its largest logical size. So in this case with Pages it just takes it to the size where one page could fit in. If I were to say Zoom in closer here and then use Option with this you can see how it resizes the window but again the width not being any wider than it needs to be. If I really want to maximize this window so it goes edge to edge then what I want to do is hold the Option Key down and double-click on any corner. Double-clicking on a corner will move that corner to the corner of the screen. So if I double-click here you can see how it moves just that top right corner, like that. Option double-clicking will do it for this corner and the opposite corner in effect moving all four sides of the window to all four edges of the screen. A lot of times that is what people want. Not necessarily going to Full Screen Mode. Here I've got this window now, still a real window and I can have windows behind it and bring other windows in front of it because it is not in Full Screen Mode like these two other windows are. Now when you're in Full Screen Mode there are two elements that you may or may not see. One is the Menu Bar here at the top and the other is the Dock at the bottom. You can control when the Menu Bar and Dock are seen and not seen by going to System Settings and then going to the Desktop & Dock and then looking for Menu Bar. There's Automatically Hide and Show the Menu Bar, either Never, Always, On Desktop Only which means a desktop with windows, or in Full Screen Only. So all four options here determines whether or not you see those. Now one of the advantages to having multiple windows is it makes it easier to Drag & Drop things from one window to another. But you can still do that using Full Screen Mode. So let's go here to this Safari window and let's say I want to grab this image here. I can start dragging it. Now if I want to drag it to another window, say that first Pages document, I can still use the Control Key and left and right arrows and move around and get to another window and drop something in. Now Full Screen Mode means there is only this window on this Desktop Space. Or does it? There is actually some exceptions. So, for instance, if I have a Safari window here in Full Screen Mode I can go to Safari, Settings and this will open up another window. But guess what? It doesn't take you out of Full Screen Mode. I can have this special window, the Settings window, available over the Full Screen window. An exception is made because it is a supporting window for what we are seeing here. This is particularly true in Mail. If I were to take this Mail main window here to Full Screen Mode and I were to compose a New Message, notice how it gives me SplitView here. I still get the main Mail window here to the left but I can compose over to the right. If I go to Mail and then Settings and then General you could see there is Prefer Opening Messages in SplitView when in Full Screen. Let's turn that Off. It is not going to change what we've already got going on here. But let's Close this message. Instead start composing a new one and now you can see it does this special little window that comes up from the bottom of the screen that allows me to compose a new message while still in Full Screen Mode. Now I've got these two Pages windows open. One is a window. One is in Full Screen Mode and Safari. What happens if I switch to Safari using the App Switcher. So I'll use the App Switcher, go to Safari, and it will take me to this Full Screen Desktop Space. So I don't actually have to go to that Desktop Space. I can just use the App Switcher as normal. There's actually a Control for this in System Settings. Under Desktop & Dock you can go down here to Mission Control and there's an option for When Switching to an Application, Switch to a Space with Open Windows for the Application. So if you're just using an app with one window and have that window in Full Screen Mode have this turned On and then you could just use the App Switcher to get from Full Screen window to Full Screen window without having to use Mission Control at all. Now there is one last thing I want to show you here in Desktop & Dock. That is down in Windows & Apps. There's a switch here for Close Windows When Quitting an Application. If you have that turned On when you quit an application it will Close the window even if it is in Full Screen Mode. So that when you start the application again it will just startup with a brand new window in your regular desktop. So let's have this On here and then I'll switch to Safari. I quit Safari and now relaunch Safari I just get a new Safari window. Let's go and take this Full Screen again and then go back to Settings here. Then set this to Not Close Windows When Quitting an Application. So now I go back to Safari and I quit Safari and now when I relaunch Safari it will reopen that window which is in Full Screen Mode thus taking me back to a Full Screen window of Safari back looking at the current set of Tabs that I was looking at before. So I hope you found all these tips for using a Full Screen Mode useful. Thanks for watching. Related Subjects: Mission Control (10 videos), Productivity (64 videos) Related Video Tutorials: 13 Tips For Getting the Most From the Safari Sidebar ― 13 Tips To Make Your MacBook Battery Last Longer ― 50 Mac Features Hidden Behind the Option Key ― 8 iPhone Home Screen Customization Tips
