macOS Sierra: The Missing Manual

Mission Control: Death to Window Clutter

These days, managing all the open windows in all the open programs can be like herding cats. Off you go, burrowing through the microscopic pop-up menus of your Dock, trying to find the window you want. And heaven help you if you need to duck back to the desktop—to find a newly downloaded file, for example, or to eject a disk. You have to fight your way through 50,000 other windows on the way to the bottom of the “deck.”

Mission Control tackles this problem in a fresh way. The concept is delicious: With one mouse click, keystroke, or finger gesture, you shrink all windows in all programs to a size that fits on the screen (Figure 6-11), like index cards on a bulletin board. Now you feel like an air-traffic controller, with all your screens arrayed before you. You click the window you want, and you’re there. It’s efficient, animated, and a lot of fun.

Tip

If you use Mission Control a lot, the zooming animation might get a little tiresome. Fortunately, in Sierra, you can turn that off. Open System Preferences→Accessibility→Display, and turn on Reduce Motion. From now on, Mission Control simply pops to the screen instead of zooming.

The window miniatures are scattered all over your screen. The placement isn’t entirely random; macOS tries to place the thumbnails on the screen relative to their full-size windows’ positions, relative to the top, bottom, and sides of your monitor.

You can impose a little more order on all of this, though. Open System Preferences→Mission ...