How To Turn Off the Reveal Desktop Feature on Your Mac

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's look at the reveal Desktop feature in macOS Sonoma and how to turn it Off.

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Now after upgrading to macOS Sonoma you may have noticed that something happens on your Mac that's different than before. Say you're working on your Mac and you've got several windows open here. You can see the Desktop behind it. Let's say you happen to click on the Desktop. If you do that you get something that looks like this. Notice how the windows retreat to the edges of the screen and you just get the Desktop wallpaper and you can see any Desktop icons that are there. Plus you get this gray box that surrounds the screen like this.

This is the Reveal Desktop feature that's actually not new to macOS Sonoma. I'm going to click on the Desktop again, anywhere there is not some sort of file or other icon, and it will go away. I'll be back to my normal looking Desktop with all the windows I had before.

Before macOS Sonoma this feature was there and you accessed it usually using the F11 key. Depending on your keyboard settings you may need to hold the fn key and then press F11 and it does exactly this. Do it again and it goes away. This feature can be found in System Settings and then if you go to Keyboard, and then you go to Keyboard Shortcuts, look at Mission Control and you'll see here Show Desktop. So this is where you may have it switched Off if F11 isn't working for you, or maybe you've changed it from F11. In addition to that if you go to Function Keys here then you would have to switch. If the switch if Off then you need to use the fn or Globe Key plus F11 to do this or if it is On the F11 key will just work by itself. You don't need to hold down another key.

Now all this was here previous to macOS Sonoma. What's new is that if you now click on the Desktop Wallpaper it does the same thing. Now this can be a little annoying for a few reasons. First of all you may accidentally click on the Desktop Wallpaper and then suddenly everything goes away. Or you may actually click on the Desktop Wallpaper specifically to bring the Finder to the front. Like if I'm here using System Settings and say I want to start searching for a file I can switch to the Finder using, say, the Finder icon here in the Dock or the App Switcher. But you can also click on the Desktop and that brings up the Finder to the front. But it also made all the windows go away which may not be what you want.

What's worse is if you actually have no windows anywhere and if you click on the Desktop background you can see it really doesn't do anything except bring up this gray box here. I already have full access to the Desktop. So clicking on it revealed the Desktop which was already very accessible. So it can be confusing as to why you're suddenly getting this box around your screen.

Now to turn this Off all you need to do is go into System Settings and then go to Desktop & Dock. Then scroll down to the Desktop & Stage Manager section. There you'll see the new macOS Sonoma option of Click Wallpaper to Reveal Desktop. By default it is set to Always. But you can change it back to Only in Stage Manager. Now Stage Manager, fairly new to macOS, always had this feature. So it's not confusing to somebody that had been using Stage Manager. But if you were using Stage Manager now it does it Always by default which is the confusing thing. So switch to Only Stage Manager and now you're back to how it was before. I can click on the Desktop as much as I want, these windows are not going to go away. So this is exactly how macOS Ventura and all the macOS versions before worked. 

You still can use the F11 key or whatever you've got set there in Keyboard Shortcuts to activate it just as before. But now it just won't happen when you click on the Desktop.

Now if you want to embrace this new feature instead, here's how to use it. See how I've got this Calculator window here and it is over these icons. So I can't easily access them. Normally I may need to move the Calculator window away or I may need to Hide the Calculator App or even minimize the Calculator window to get access to those icons. But now I can simply click on the Desktop background. Everything moves away and now I can access one of these. I can double click it and it will open up that file. The same thing, of course, is possible and was possible before, to use the F11 and I can do that and get access to them temporarily like that.

I can even Drag and Drop using this feature. So instead of moving the Calculator window out of the way if I want to drag one of these files into one of these folders here I could use F11 or, say, click on the Desktop background. It moves everything out of the way. I start dragging and while I'm still dragging I use F11 again to Dismiss it and now I can drag this into a folder.

So you can decide whether or not you want to embrace this feature and use clicking on the Desktop background as a way to get access to the files on the Desktop or you can decide to turn it Off there in System Settings and just use F11 if you ever need it.

I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.