Mac Basics: Mission Control

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you how to use Mission Control on your Mac.

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Now when using your Mac you may have your screen crowded with lots of different apps and lots of different windows. This is especially problematic if you're on a MacBook where the screens are smaller than if you're using an iMac. So, for instance, your screen may look like this. Here I've got Calculator, Calendar, Mail, Pages, and Safari and I'm trying to use them all at once. I have to constantly move windows in front of or behind other windows, shrink and enlarge windows to get my work done. But you can use Mission Control to make things better. What Mission Control does is it gives you multiple Desktops. So what we see here is one desktop with all these different windows on it. But we can use another desktop and put some of these windows there. It's kind of like having multiple screens on your Mac. But instead of having multiple physical displays you've got multiple screens that you can switch to on your one display. 

So to activate Mission Control you can use Control and Up Arrow or on many Macs you've got a Mission Control shortcut as the F3 key. So either press F3 or hold the fn key down and press F3. This brings up Mission Control. You can see the first thing it does is it takes all the windows and moves them apart. So you can see exactly what you've got. Then at the top it shows you you have one Desktop. You move your cursor there it will expand and show you exactly what that Desktop looks like. We can add a second Desktop using the Plus button here on the right. I click that and now I have Desktop 1 and Desktop 2. Desktop 2 you can see is empty. So let's move some of these windows there. For instance lets move Calendar there and maybe also Mail. Leaving Pages, Safari, and Calculator all on Desktop 1.

Now let's go to one of these Desktops. So you can do that simply by clicking on that Desktop. Now you can see I just have those three apps there. Things are a little less cluttered. I can go back to Mission Control the same way and click on the second Desktop to go to it. I could also use keyboard shortcuts to quickly switch between Desktops. So Control and left and right arrows go between the two Desktops. So Control Left Arrow takes me to the first one. Control Right Arrow takes me back to the second. If you have a MacBook or an Apple Trackpad you can also use a gesture to do this. Use four fingers on the Trackpad and swipe left or right to quickly move between Desktops. There's a setting for this in System Preferences, Trackpad under More Gestures. So you can see it here and you can customize it. 

Now you can continue to add more Desktops. So you can go back into Mission Control and add a third Desktop. So now that's empty but I can move something to it like I did before or I can simply drag something to it. So let's move this Pages window to that third Desktop. While I'm dragging it I've got the mouse or trackpad clicked and held down I can use Control and right arrow to switch to the third Desktop and drop the window there. So now I've got three Desktops and I can move the windows around on each one of those. In Mission Control I can move the Desktops around, so rearrange them into any order I want. I can Add new ones. Notice I have this little X button when I move over one of the Desktops. If I Close the Desktop it will close and that window will return to the Desktop it was previously. So you can really think of this like you've got two different screens on your Mac and you could just switch between them very easily. 

Now people use this in different ways. Sometimes they'll just use the second Desktop to get some windows out of the way and concentrate on something on the other Desktop. Other times they'll make each Desktop specific to a task they're doing. So, for instance, you may have Pages, Notes, and a Safari window all on one Desktop because you're writing a paper and doing research at the same time. Then another window may have Reminders, Mail, and Calendar because that's the Desktop you go to to check your emails, schedule events, see what's going on. 

In addition to having Desktops like this that have windows on them, there are two other types of Desktops. One is for a Full Screen App. So, for instance, with Safari here if I want to take Safari full screen I can do that by clicking the green button or hovering over the green button and clicking Enter Full Screen. This takes Safari full screen. The Menu Bar is gone but I could get it back by moving my cursor up there. The Dock is gone but I could move my cursor down there to see that as well. If I look now in Mission Control I could see I've got Desktop 1 and Desktop 2 but I have a Desktop that's just called Safari. It's showing Safari full screen. I could arrange this Desktop just like the others. So Full Screen Apps take up an entire Desktop of their own. 

The third type of Desktop you could have is a Split View Desktop. It's the same thing as Full Screen except two apps instead of one. So I can move my cursor over the green button here, say Tile the window to the left. Then select another window to be the right. Now you can see how this is Split View. It's like full screen but an app on the left and an app on the right. If I look in Mission Control you could see that's represented as another Desktop and it's called Mail and Calendar. So with four Desktops I could still use Control and Left and Right Arrows to move between all of them or the four fingers on the Trackpad gesture. 

There's some settings for Mission Control in System Preferences under Mission Control. So for instance you could have the Desktops, also called Spaces, Automatically Rearrange themselves according to the most recent use. You have some other options here as well. You have control over the Keyboard Shortcuts. So while I was using Control and Up Arrow you can actually set it to a variety of different things here including even using some of the modifier keys you may not normally use. Like Right Shift or Right Command to trigger Mission Control. Also a lot of people like to use Hot Corners to trigger Mission Control. So you can go and set the lower left hand corner for instance to trigger Mission control. So when I move my cursor down to the bottom left hand corner of the screen Mission Control appears. 

So if you haven't been using Mission Control, give it a try especially if you're using a MacBook. It really opens up a whole new world of being able to arrange your applications like you want and be more productive. It's perfectly normal to sometimes use Mission Control and other times not. For instance you may decide to create a second Desktop or Space when you want to work on something and just concentrate on one, two, or three apps and have all the rest of your apps on the other Desktop. But when you're not trying to concentrate on something have everything on just one Desktop and not be using Mission Control. It's up to you how you want to use it.