An In-Depth Look at macOS Ventura Stage Manager

Stage Manager is a new multitasking feature for macOS Ventura and iPadOS 16. Learn how it works and all of the options. See how it operates with app switching, multiple desktops and the Dock.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary at MacMost.com. Let's take a look at the new Stage Manager feature in macOS Ventura.
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Perhaps the most talked about feature coming to macOS Ventura in the Fall is Stage Manager. Stage Manager is a new way to multitask. It's a little different than just using regular Windows or using Mission Control with spaces. It's also available on the iPad. So it's a feature that will work both on iPads with M1 processors and Macs. So it will be easy to use if you move between a Mac and an iPad. 
So here's basically how it works. Open Contacts, Reminders, Notes, Calendar and let's say open Safari and Mail as well. So now we've got a lot of windows here, all bunched up on one space. So a way to manage that in the past would just be to position the windows around the screen, maybe use the App Switcher to go between them. You can always use Mission Control. I'm going to use Up Arrow and then choose one of these for Set Multiple Desktops. 
But now with Stage Manager there's another way. You turn Stage Manager on by going to Control Center up here and then click on Stage Manager and then it turns it On. If you click again you'll get Options including the option to turn it off. We will look more at that in a minute. So now that you have Stage Manager turned On you basically have the list of apps that are running here on the left. If you want to go to one you simply click it. You could see how it comes here to the front. So here's Calendar. If I want to switch to Mail I click on Mail. There's Reminders. Now you are only going to see four here on the left. At least on my screen. I've got the resolution set pretty low here for screen recording. But normally you can get up to six here on the left and possibly even more. Remember this is only the first developer beta so things might change. For instance there seems to be a maximum of six you can get on the left on a normal screen. But maybe that will go higher by the time we get to the final version of Ventura in the Fall. Keep that mind with everything I'm going to show you here.
So notice that each one of these kind of gives you a window centered right here on the screen. There seems to be a lot of extra space around to the right and sometimes above and below depending upon your screen size as well. But you don't have to just leave it like that. You can expand the window. So I'm going to make this one expand all the way over to the right and still leave space here to the left. With Notes I can do the same thing and you saw how the Reminders list here it was pretty small and I can expand it here like that and it remembers it. So, if I go back to Mail you can see  how it uses all that space. Notes and Calendar I didn't change it so it is still like that. 
Now if you can only see four or perhaps six on the left side of your screen how do you switch to apps that aren't shown. After all we do have other apps like say Contacts here. Well, I can just switch to the Contacts app just like I would in any other mode here. Just use the Dock to go to it and it will appear. Or I can use the App Switcher. So, for instance, right now I don't see Safari here. But if I do Command Tab and go to Safari it will come up. So the standard ways for switching apps still work. These just show you the apps you most recently used. Note that if you have more than one window open in an app it will appear here as one group. So, let's go to Notes here and notice that Safari actually shows two windows here. If I switch to Safari I still see one other window there and I can click and switch between these two windows. You could also group things together. Let's say I want to do Calendar and Notes together. I go to Calendar, right here. I could go to Notes but instead of clicking on it I'm just going to drag it to the right. Now you can see these two windows are together. I can position them anyway I want. Have them overlapping or not. Notice if I switch to another app that Notes and Calendar are together. I can go here to go back to it. I think you can fit up to five different apps together like this. You can also do multiple windows for an app. So here in Notes I can, for instance, double-click on this note here and you could see I get this other little note window. Now this is a separate one here but I can go in here, I can drag it over to the right and now both these Notes' windows are here together. You could see here three little windows grouped together. 
You could also have this take up the entire window. There is no magic barrier here preventing you from going all the way to the left. So I could move this all the way to the left like that. Now you can see it covers up what's there on the left. If I switch to another app. Let's switch to Safari and the Safari window is over to the right enough for these to appear. But if I go back to Reminders you can see it covers those which is fine. I can still switch apps just like before and I could still actually bring up Stage Manager by moving the pointer all the way to the left. It comes up like this. It springs out and it's not in kind of a 3D mode here. It's in a flat 2D mode so I can switch to another set of apps or window here like that. You can do that when you have groups of windows. Like so this one here I can move Calendar all the way to the left so I have more room for these windows here. Let's just put it like that or something and now you can see I can still go over here and switch to Contacts and notice here that Calendar and Notes are still together like that. It remembers where they are. 
So I hear people say that this takes up a lot of space. Look at how much space it eats up on the left side. Well, it doesn't really because you can expand the window as much as you want outside of that and you can expand the window over that if you want. Then just have it pop-up only when you move the pointer to the left. In fact, if you go back here into Control Center and then Stage Manager and turn on Hide Recent Apps like that, then the Recent Apps List here on the left goes away completely even when the window is there. So you always have to use the pointer to go over to the left. In that case you don't have any reason to not have your windows cover the entire screen just as they would have before. 
Now let's go back to having the recent apps here on the left here like that. Let me show you that there's actually another mode here. You could see here there are four different recent groups on the left and, of course, you've got Safari here on the right taking up the screen. That's the one I'm currently using. Instead of clicking on one of these you just click somewhere on the Desktop, like this, and you get a mode where it shows your Desktop. If I had any files on the Desktop I would then see them here. You just see the little Stage Manager groups here to the left. So, if you are using something that is taking up the whole screen I could click, let's say, down here next to the Dock and that's another way to bring these up.
So as you can see there's already a lot of different variety of how you can use Stage Manager which is exciting. I think the hallmark of some of the best features of macOS is a variety of different ways that you can use and manipulate a feature like this. 
Now I showed you before in Safari there's actually two Safari windows open. So I click here and I see one and I click here again and I see another. I can actually group these together. If I drag this one here now they are together as one. If I switch here and then let's switch back to Safari notice how it remembers these two are there. If I want to separate them again I just drag one here to the left and now when I go to Safari you can see there's two there but they are back to being separate little groups. So how does this work with Mission Control? Well, it turns out it works really well. Let's take this one Safari window full screen. So now it is its own space. If I use Control Up Arrow I could see here I've got my Desktop and I've got Safari full screen. I can switch back to the Desktop here and everything is like it is before except that one Safari window is full screen. I can go back into Mission Control with Control Up Arrow or I could use Control Right to go to the right, Control Left to go back over here. In fact you can create multiple Desktops. I'll create another Desktop here Mission Control. Call this Desktop 2. I'll move right next to Desktop 1. Let's go and move something like say for instance I'm going to drag Mail here and let's say let's drag Reminders here as well. Now let's go back to Desktop 1. You could see I only have these groups here in Desktop 1. Let's Control Right Arrow to Desktop 2. I'm going to move this over and you can see I've only got these two windows here in Desktop 2. 
So Stage Manager is working here on both Desktops. But with different groups on each one. Stage Manager works pretty well here with the Dock as well. I'm going to use Command Option D to hide the Dock. You can see how it creates a little bit more room here for Stage Manager. I can still bring up the Dock as normal. But what if I moved the Dock to the Left side as some people use. So I'll bring up Desktop and Dock settings here and I'm going to set the position to be on the left side. Now you don't see it there because it is Hidden but if I go to the left you can see how the Dock still appears over Stage Manager. If I turn off Automatic Hiding you can see the Dock appears and actually pushes Stage Manager a little bit to the Right. So it becomes kind of this super control here on the left. I have all of my Dock items, including the ability of course to click and hold and then have all access to all the different windows and recent windows and commands for each of these apps. I have Stage Manager groups here just to the right of the Dock and I could still move my windows all the way to the left. It's not blocking me from doing that at all.
You can see here it appears Stage Manager has really been built for versatility. You can use it in all sorts of different ways. One person may be using Stage Manager with everything visible all the time just switching between three or four groups and another person may be using it in conjunction with Mission Control. Have windows grouped together. Another person may be using it in conjunction with spaces and Mission Control to have multiple Desktops all using Stage Manager. Some people have have it Hidden. Other people may have it always shown. Some people may just have each group in Stage Manager as just a single window and they just switch between those. Other people may have groups of windows. Some people may decide have the Dock on the left. It's really exciting how many different ways you can use it. Of course you can also just shut it off. You don't need to use it at all. It's a completely optional feature. You can continue using windows and Desktops on your Mac just as you have before. It doesn't change any of those features. 
Two more tips I want to show you. One is that notice when you use Stage Manager you don't see files on your Desktop. I didn't actually have any files on the Desktop. So it didn't actually make any difference for me. But when I click on the Desktop now it reveals that I actually have some files there. So this actually makes things a little neater. You can have a crowded Desktop but as soon as you go into an app like this it all goes away. You don't see any of that stuff behind the windows in the Stage Manager groups. 
Another cool feature isn't actually new to Stage Manager. It's something you can always do with Control Center. I can go in here and I can drag this into the Menu Bar. So now instead of having to go into Control Center I can click here and easily turn off Stage Manager and you could see how it nicely turns off all the windows are just now on the Desktop where they should be. I can click here again and easily turn it On  and also switch to whether or not the groups are shown here on the left pretty easily so if you're going to be using Stage Manager a lot having this in the Menu Bar is really handy and hopefully we get the Keyboard Shortcut to turn this On or Off which would be handy for a lot of people. It's not there in beta 1 but I'm hopeful it will be there by the time Ventura comes out in the Fall. 
From my personal experience testing this out i have to say this is a feature you really need to try before you judge. A lot of people coming out with opinions whether or not they would like Stage Manager before they have ever tried it. Honestly it didn't seem like the kind of feature that I'd would be interested in as I already work pretty well with the current multitasking features in macOS. But once I started testing this out in Ventura I noticed I really missed having it in Monterey when I'm doing my regular work. So don't decide now whether or not you think this is a feature for you. Wait until Ventura comes out and then give it a try and you may be surprised to find out that you actually like it. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 3 Responses to “An In-Depth Look at macOS Ventura Stage Manager”

Daniel Joseph

3 years ago

Thanks. I am quite sure that I will use Stage Manager a lot. I often have from two to about four apps open, and while I am working on one, the others should be available but not intrusive or in the way. Stage Manager seems to be designed just for that. As to new features I often think, there is noting in this for me, but it is a good bet that this one will make things a lot easier and more convenient.

Jim Flannery

I'm using Universal Control. My iPad is left of the iMac. When I move my cursor to the left edge, it jumps to the iPad. How's that gonna work with Stage Manager????

Gary Rosenzweig

Jim: Not 100% sure as I haven't tried it, but I assume it would work the same as if you had two screens, or were just using the Mac and iPad with two different trackpads. You would get Stage Manager when moving the pointer to the left side of either.

Comments Closed.

An In-Depth Look at macOS Ventura Stage Manager

Comments: 3 Responses to “An In-Depth Look at macOS Ventura Stage Manager”

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