Master Stage Manager

Organise your desktop with this great new window-management feature

- Ian Osborne

IT WILL TAKE

5 minutes

YOU WILL LEARN

How to use Stage Manager

YOU’LL NEED

macOS 13

Stage Manager is a brand new way of organising your desktop, which comes to the Mac with macOS Ventura. It’s designed to work hand in hand with existing desktop manager features such as Mission Control, Spaces, Stacks and Finder Tabs, but it works very differently.

When you have too many windows open on your Mac, activating Stage Manager pushes them all – except the one you’re currently using – into a column in the left-hand side of the screen, organised according to the app that created them. You can then switch to another app’s window simply by clicking on it; the new app window is opened, and the one you were previously using is minimised into the Stage Manager area. It’s available on Macs running macOS Ventura, and also iPadOS 16 – although some models, such as the new iPad 10.9-inch - can’t use it.

Over the next couple of pages, we take a look at how to launch and use Stage Manager, and how to get the most from it.