Go to System Settings > Control Center, then choose Show in Menu Bar. If you plan to toggle Stage Manager often, you can add a menu extra to your menubar, indicated by the red arrow in the screenshot above. If you hide recent apps, moving your cursor to the left of the screen displays these thumbnails. You can also choose to show or hide recent apps that’s the thumbnails on the left of the screen. You can toggle Stage Manager on and off this is useful, because there may be times when you want to work in this mode, and others when you don’t want to. Click the Stage Manager icon, and you see this dialog: To activate Stage Manager, click the Control Center icon in the menubar (in the screenshot below, it’s the icon just to the left of the date). When you do this, the app you click expands to become visible, and the last active app slides to the left of your screen. You can switch apps by pressing Command-Tab and using the Application Switcher, by clicking an icon in the Dock, or by clicking one of the thumbnails on the left of your display.

Stage Manager also shows you thumbnails of other active apps on the left side of your display. (You can do this by choosing the menu with the name of the current app, then choosing Hide Others, or by pressing Command-Option-H.) This is a good way to focus on a single app, and not be distracted by other windows in the background. Instead of having layers of overlapping windows on your screen, you can have a single app window visible, or you can create groups of windows from multiple apps that display when you want.Īt the most basic level, with just one window visible, Stage Manager is a lot like activating an app window then hiding all other windows. Stage manager is a new way for Apple’s operating systems to manage and display the windows of the apps you work with. Here’s how Stage Manager works, and why you may want to use it. Now, with macOS Ventura and iPadOS 16, Apple is introducing Stage Manager, the biggest change in the way we work with windows in decades. You can open multiple windows, arrange them on the screen, switch from one to another easily, and even hide windows when you don’t want to see them. Since then, the way we work with windows has not changed. On the Mac, we went from being able to use one app at a time, to an early form of multitasking (the Multifinder, with System 5.0 in 1987), to true preemptive multitasking in 1999 with Mac OS 8.6.

While computers have changed a great deal since the first personal computers, one thing hasn’t: the way we work with windows. How To + Recommended Stage Manager offers new way to work with windows in macOS Ventura and iPadOS 16

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