Mission Control and Spaces

Mission Control shows every open window and Space at once. When your screen fills up with overlapping windows, it is the fastest way to see what is actually open and jump to the window you need.

Open it with the configured trackpad gesture or keyboard shortcut. The defaults:

Control-Up       Mission Control (all windows and Spaces)
Control-Down     windows of the current app only
Control-Left     previous Space
Control-Right    next Space

On a trackpad, swipe up with three fingers for Mission Control and sideways with three fingers to move between Spaces.

Spaces

A Space is an extra desktop. In Mission Control, move the pointer to the top of the screen and click the + button in the Spaces bar to create one. Drag windows between the thumbnails to reorganize.

Create separate Spaces for different kinds of work, such as coding, communication, and reference material. Switching with Control-Right then feels like turning your head to a second desk instead of shuffling windows.

A full-screen application receives its own Space automatically. That is why swiping sideways sometimes reveals a full-screen app you forgot about — it lives in its own slot in the Spaces bar.

You can pin an app to a Space permanently: right-click its Dock icon and choose Options → Assign To → This Desktop. From then on the app always opens there.

Keep it predictable

One setting undermines the whole system: Automatically rearrange Spaces based on most recent use, in Desktop & Dock settings. With it on, macOS reorders your Spaces behind your back, and “coding is one swipe left” stops being true. If Spaces keep swapping positions on you, this setting is the reason. Turn it off.

Keep the setup small enough that you still know where each window lives. Two or three Spaces with clear jobs beat seven you have to search through — searching through Spaces is the problem Mission Control was meant to solve, not recreate.