Recent versions of macOS have added new ways to lay out windows, including Stage Manager and most recently tiling. This collection of screenshots demonstrates the repertoire available in macOS 15 Sequoia, with brief notes to suggest how to get the best from them. Controls and options for most of these are in Desktop & Dock settings, except where given otherwise. There are also many third-party enhancements available: those are intentionally omitted for the sake of simplicity and clarity. Similarly, there are often several different controls and actions that can achieve the same effect. Only the more obvious are given here. To enlarge any of the screenshots below, click on the image.

Full screen single window

This is the simplest of all, best suited to windows already containing multiple views that need full space, here with Xcode. Control whether the window is displayed with or without the menu bar in Control Centre settings, in Automatically hide and show the menu bar at its foot. Integrate this with access to the Finder and other apps by setting it in its own Space.

To put a window in full screen mode, click on its green traffic light control at its top left, or use the command in the View menu. To exit, use the same controls.

Freestyle overlapping

Probably the most traditional and popular layout, with multiple overlapping windows from different apps. Although dynamic and flexible, it’s easy to lose track of apps and windows in their multiple layers.

To find a lost window or app, enter Mission Control by pressing the F3 key, then click on the window to bring it into focus. Switch focus between apps by selecting the app in the Dock.

Use the Desktop to collect your working documents, or set it as wallpaper.

Tiled

Some apps, here BBEdit in its Find Differences feature, tile multiple views into a single window, here with linked scrollers. Sequoia provides additional tools to tile app windows so they don’t overlap. These are best suited to layouts with 2-4 windows occupying similar areas, but can be adapted for others.

Simplest are two windows arranged in a split view, either horizontally or vertically. Arrange them using the Move & Resize commands in the Window menu, from the window’s green traffic light control popup menu, or by moving the window with controls enabled in Desktop & Dock settings. Note the latter don’t work with windows dragged to the bottom edge of the screen, only the top and sides.

For those who like a clean, regular look with four open windows, tile them into quadrants with the same controls. This shows the small gaps between windows when Tiled windows have margins is enabled in Desktop & Dock settings.

Use a regular tiled layout adjusted to suit their contents better. Resizing windows manually loses the margins of the original tiling.

The alternative Full Screen Split View is quick to create. To put the currently focussed window into one half, use one of the Full Screen Tile options in the Window menu, or its green traffic light popup menu. That puts the other half of the display into Mission Control, where you select the window to place in the other half of the Split View.

Adjust the balance between the size of the two windows using the central bar. To return the windows to normal, click on their green traffic light control.

On their own, tiled layouts are constraining, but when used in their own Space can be valuable.

Stage Manager

Stage Manager puts a suite of windows from one or more apps into a single active group on stage, with quick switching between different suites. Enable and control it in its section in Desktop & Dock settings. Switch between different window groups simply by clicking on them in the icon list at the left.

Management of suites is dynamic, and detailed in the following articles:

1. Getting started
2. Workflow strategies
3. Apps and windows

For further flexibility, use Stage Manager in one or more Spaces.

Spaces

Spaces are complete Desktop layouts you can switch between, accessed through Mission Control. To create a second Space, press F3 for Mission Control and move your pointer to the top of the display, then click on the + at the right. Options are at the very bottom of Desktop & Dock settings. Any of the above layouts can be included as a Space.

Multiviews

One remaining problem with layouts is support for multiple views of the same document. Better text editors let you split a window into two views of the same document, useful when you need to refer back while editing. Browsers will open two tabs or windows on the same page. However, very few PDF viewers let you view more than one section at once of the same PDF in multiple windows. That’s a feature of my free Podofyllin.

Apple Help

• Freestyle
• Full screen
• Tiling
• Full screen split view
• Stage Manager
• Spaces and Mission Control

Have fun exploring all of these.

Writing a coherent and comprehensive description of a painting is an excellent exercise not only for writing skills, but to remind yourself of the adage that a picture is worth a thousand words. Nowhere is this more appropriate than when describing graphical user interfaces such as macOS, as I reminded myself this week when trying to sort out a problem with Desktop behaviour.

That took me to Sequoia’s revised System Settings, where those for Desktop & Dock have become a farrago covering anything from the default web browser to the addition of margins to tiled windows. Although I’ve been one of System Settings’ few advocates, that section has become an example of what they shouldn’t be.

After the Finder, tools for configuring the appearance and behaviour of the interface are the most important. For many years, we had to do this through the keyhole of the fixed window size provided by System Preferences.

Many of its more complex panes had to resort to multiple tabs, here in the Network pane of 2002.

This was no easier for relatively simple panes, such as Sound, seen here in macOS 12 nearly 20 years later.

Ventura’s completely reworked System Settings were controversial, but at last provided the ability to expand panes vertically, although at that time many used floating windows to arrange discrete groups of settings in a hierarchy, such as those for Stage Manager.

Some of those used pictures, although most were illustrative rather than replacements for a thousand words, unlike the screenshot below.

Sequoia’s Desktop & Dock settings have been flattened out into a single view that’s so deep it even has to be scrolled on a Studio Display. Its sections include the Dock, Desktop, Stage Manager, Widgets, default web browser, Windows, tiling, Mission Control, keyboard shortcuts and Hot Corners, while further settings for the Desktop are controlled in Appearance and Wallpaper. Many of these are obscure unless you already use a feature, and many need further help, even for those who have been using macOS for years.

Like Desktop & Dock settings, its help page uses words exclusively rather than pictures, often doing little more than paraphrasing the text labels already shown in System Settings. Apple Support is one of many to provide a video tutorial for these settings, but those are of limited benefit when you just want to check how the options available for tabs in windows affect the appearance and behaviour of document windows, for example. Yet that would be so simple to demonstrate in three cutouts from screenshots, and so much more meaningful than the paraphrasing in Help: “Choose when you want documents to open in a tab (instead of in a new window): Never, Always or In Full Screen.”

In the last few years, Apple has devoted considerable engineering effort into enriching the macOS human interface, with Stage Manager and most recently Sequoia’s tiling feature. Even though you may not wish to use either, they do have their uses and some find them powerful.

Tiling is a case in point, as Apple seems to have decided that it should be enabled by default when you upgrade to Sequoia. That results in frustratingly changed behaviour when you drag a small window up to the top or another edge of the display, and it suddenly tiles out to cover the whole screen, without offering any Undo. Only by rummaging through System Settings will you discover that you can return that to normal by turning off Tile by dragging windows to screen edges in Desktop & Dock settings, although this has nothing to do with the Desktop or Dock.

In principle, I still believe System Settings is the right way forward, with its vertical flexibility and use of SwiftUI. But leading designs using those now come from third-party developers. It’s time for Apple to reassert its former mastery of the human interface, and realise the potential of SwiftUI by making System Settings a paragon rather than a pickle.