MacOS has had Spaces, Expose, Mission Control, Launchpad, three-finger plus a thumb gestures, and more, but none of them have made arranging and working with multiple application windows as easy and controllable as it is in Windows. The new Stage Manager feature, which just arrived with macOS Ventura, could change that. It also supplements the not-very-functional macOS Dock (compared with Windows 10’s more functional Taskbar—sorry Windows 11).
At this year's WWDC, the amusing and likable Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, pretty much admitted how bad multi-windowing is on the Mac. "The more you do, the more overwhelming [having multiple windows open] can become," he said. "We want to easily move between tasks [like you can in Microsoft Windows].” (The part in brackets is mine, as you may have surmised.)
I often bore my Mac-loving coworkers by whining about how sometimes when you click on a program’s icon in the Dock, none of its windows appears on the screen. This drives me crazy and is one of the things that makes it so that I can’t wait to get back to a Windows machine. It’s due to macOS’s document-centric design in which the OS takes over all program’s menus rather than allowing them to create their own (unless they don’t mind having two sets of menu options). Stage Manager helps to fix that issue.
The feature places a stack of window thumbnails to the side of your main window. Aside from making it easier to switch among programs, another appealing thing about these tiles is that they let you choose which document open in the app to show on the desktop. Unfortunately, this involves sequentially cycling through the windows in the pile. The Windows Taskbar can pop up all open windows for an app so you can switch to the one you want with just one click.
A problem that Stage Manager doesn’t address, or at least not adequately for me, is arranging windows on your desktop for the best access and usability. Windows 11 added to the OS’s already-superior window-arrangement options by introducing Snap Layouts, which make it easy to arrange multiple application windows in desktop-space-optimizing arrangements. Perhaps an even bigger convenience still lacking in macOS is how Windows lets you fill exactly half the screen with an app window by simply dragging it against the side of the desktop. This is something I use daily, even right now, to move this text from Word to our content management system.
Stage Manager handles having two app windows open at once, but in all the images I've seen, one window overlaps the other so you don’t see both full windows at once. I like having the freedom to arrange the windows to taste, and (another feather in the feature’s cap) Stage Manager helpfully lets you call up multiple windows you’ve arranged in the same arrangement for later use.
Another issue is full-screen windows. MacOS has two different full-screen options, one that preserves the menu and another that creates an additional virtual desktop for the window. In Windows, apps can fill the whole screen without having the complexity of another virtual desktop. On a similar note, Stage Manager doesn’t help you when you are running an app full screen (which is the best way to view complex media-editing apps like Photoshop or Final Cut). Instead, it decides how big the window you’ve selected from the side thumbnails should be.
Stage Manager does solve one of my big bugaboos with macOS: showing the desktop. It seems like it should be easy, and it is simple in Windows—you just tap Windows Key-D or move the cursor to the lower-right corner of the screen (if you have Desktop Peek enabled). You can do a similar thing with a little more setup in macOS by using the Hot Corners feature. But Stage Manager gets you to the desktop with a simple tap on the desktop—a great solution. It also lets you drag a file from the desktop onto one of Stage Manager's app stacks, which is another big help.
It remains to be seen whether Stage Manager will be enough of a change to make me feel like I can use macOS as efficiently as I can Windows. I certainly realize that many have the completely opposite take, but the new window-management tool certainly seems to be a step in the right direction.
For more, check out our hands on with Apple's M2 MacBook Air and the video below.