Mission Control Tips

Mission Control Icon

If you’ve just finished installing your shiny new copy of Mac OS X Lion, here are a few tips for Apple’s replacement for Spaces and Exposé — “Mission Control”. For each of these tips, I’m going to assume you’ve created at least one new Desktop in Mission Control — if you haven’t, do that now.

Create a new Desktop for an application or window

Activate Mission Control;
Click and hold on either an individual window, or an application’s icon;
Drag the selected item up the top right corner of your display — as you do this, a slightly transparent Desktop will slide out from the right-hand side of the screen with a “+” on it;
Drop the selected item onto this new Desktop;
Bingo! You have a new Desktop, with your selected items on it — simply click the new Desktop to switch to it.

Set different desktop images for each Desktop

Switch to the Desktop you want to change the desktop picture on;
Launch ‘System Preferences.app’;
Go to ‘Desktop & Screen Saver’;
Set your desktop image the same way you always do;
Move the ‘Desktop & Screen Saver’ window to the next Desktop by dragging it to the edge of your screen and holding it there for a second or two;
Change the desktop image on that Desktop;
Yell our ‘hooray!’ a little bit, cause it’s pretty cool to have different desktop images on each of your Desktops (‘Hooray’ completely optional).

Set hotkeys to go directly to each Desktop

Launch ‘System Preferences.app’;
Go to ‘Keyboard’;
Select the ‘Keyboard Shortcuts’ tab;
From the source list on the left, select ‘Mission Control’;
The final entries in the list on the right should correspond to your individual Desktops — they will be labelled ‘Switch to Desktop 1′, ‘Switch to Desktop 2′, etc;
Set a keyboard shortcut — make sure that you enable the shortcut by clicking on the checkbox next to its name;
Party like it’s Mac OS X Snow Leopard running Hyperspaces (*Partying not provided in package)

Assign an application to a specific Desktop, or all Desktops using the Dock

Right-click on the icon of the application in the Dock you want to move to another Desktop;
Select ‘Options » Assign To » All Desktops’ to show this application on all Desktops (this is useful for applications like the Finder, iChat and Twitter); OR Select ‘Options » Assign To » This Desktop’ to make the application open new windows on the current Desktop, even if you’re working on another Desktop;

Note: These settings persist through quitting and re-opening an application, so if you ever decide you don’t like this setting follow the instructions as above but select ‘None’ from the menu.

Like I’ve said before, I really like Mission Control — it’s got the right blend of features and simplicity for the way I work. I’ve had to modify my work patterns a little, but it feels frictionless next to the old Spaces to me (hundreds of Hyperspaces users everywhere gasp!). I’m sure as we all spend more time with Mission Control, more features will come to light — I’ll post them here as I find them.

∞
Posted: July 22, 2011 at 15:09
Tagged: Mac, Productivity, Tips

Comments

How do you move a window from another desktop to the current desktop? Only way I could find was to switch to the other desktop, then bring up Mission Control to drag it to the desktop I want.
Kind of disappointed so far, much prefer Gnome Shell, but then I’ve only used this for a few hours :P

Posted by Rowan Lewis on July 22, 2011 at 16:09

Hey Rowan — just drag a window to the edge of the screen (in the direction you want to move) and hold it there.

Posted by Tony Arnold on July 22, 2011 at 16:10

Really? Well, I guess that’ll do.

Posted by Rowan Lewis on July 22, 2011 at 16:15

You know what helps? Reading things. I completely misread your comment.
Yeah, I don’t think you can move a window on another desktop to the current desktop. You can move the whole app using that Dock menu tip above, but not individual windows as far as I can see.

Posted by Tony Arnold on July 22, 2011 at 16:55

If you hold ‘alt’ then click on a different desktop in Mission Control, you view that desktop without leaving Mission Control. You could then drag windows from that desktop into your original desktop.

Posted by Jonathan on July 22, 2011 at 18:00

Jonathan, that does the trick! Gnome Shell still does it better though ;P
PS. Tony, you should extend the “your mum” rule to cover “your mum” jokes.

Posted by Rowan Lewis on July 22, 2011 at 20:29

Thanks for the tips Tony, I’ve just installed Lion this morning and still playing around with Mission Control :)

Posted by Yogi — ThemeWarrior on July 23, 2011 at 00:34

I’m holding off on Lion because it seems I’ll lose my dual monitor, 12 spaces setup. Each app has its own assigned space and monitor, some apps have windows on different spaces, and I can switch to anything with command-tab or control-[space #].
Your tips shed a ray of hope that switching to Lion won’t completely kill my workflow. But here’s my question:
If I assign an app to Desktop 5 (I assume I’ll have to manually create 4 more desktops first), after I restart the Mac and launch that app, will it go to Desktop 5, automatically creating it? Or will all apps launch to Desktop 1, forcing me to manually move each one after launch?

Posted by Erwin on July 23, 2011 at 02:19

Erwin: Yup.

Posted by Roger Benningfield on July 23, 2011 at 04:28

Roger: Yup which?

Posted by Erwin on July 23, 2011 at 04:52

Awesome tips! Thanks. One more thing chuckles, to move an app with multiple windows at once, make sure to drag the app’s icon in Mission Control (not its window).

Posted by Felix Widjaja on July 23, 2011 at 14:18

Does anyone know how to switch between desktop windows using the keyboard in mission control? In Snow Leopard, when you activated Expose you could press tab to jump from window to window, but it doesn’t seem to work in Lion.

Posted by Ian on July 24, 2011 at 02:28

Nevermind — figured it out. It’s the tilde ~ key. Not sure I like that change, but at least it’s still possible to do it.

Posted by Ian on July 24, 2011 at 02:30

Backgrounds work for now, but not when covered up by apps, Still wanting a textual way to recognize desktops instead of generic labels.

Posted by Jeff on July 24, 2011 at 17:27

TERRIBLE how Mission control does not include ones minimised apps. This one is killing me and would be so easily fixed with an option in preferences

Posted by Cam on July 24, 2011 at 23:03

Re switching between desktops while in Mission Control (to view all open windows by Desktop) — on my iMac the tilde key switches between all open apps in turn, showing the open windows in each app only. Switching focus between different desktops (to show open windows in selected desktop) can be done with keystrokes using control + right /left arrows keys, or control + number — although confusingly dashboard (if enabled in Mission Control) is 1, so Desktop 1 is Control + 2, Desktop 2 Control + 3, etc.

Posted by Steve Longworth on July 31, 2011 at 00:57

Just want to pay tribute to Hyperspaces. Thanks. I’m gonna get a new harddisk and downgrade as soon as i finish my thesis. Lion spaces is horrible. If you boot your computer, and for example chrome is still on (as programs are in lion) i somehow see my homepage shortly while switching space but somehow i can’t get hold of it. i need to restart chrome to get a browser window to work with. A second thing is popups. You open a program (i have this with PASW/SPSS) in one space, and then drag part of it over to another space. If you want to quit the program the ‘do you want to save’ popups are in the original space where you opened the program but you can’t get hold of them because the space keeps moving you back to the space where the window (and not the popup) is… so you have to drag the window back to the original space before you can close it. retarded. Next to that i totally miss the carrousel function, so i only have to program one button on my mouse to switch spaces..
all these problems were never had working with hyperspaces.. i didn’t know what kind of magic this was until apple destroyed it. Thanks for the times we had.

Posted by Martijn on August 9, 2011 at 07:04

Do you know if there is a way to have shortcuts and/or icons on one mission control desktop but not on another? I understand the concept of assigning an application to a different desktop, but I was hoping to be able to customize my desktops with the icons/shortcuts that I chose and have them show up on only the desktop I select. Maybe it is just a limitation of mission control at this time. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks everyone!!!

Posted by Chris DelGaudio on September 7, 2011 at 04:41

How do I force Mission Control to open each program/application in a new window?

Posted by milton adams on October 10, 2011 at 03:02

I was really bummed out to find that Apple had removed the dock feature that, when you click-and-hold on an app in the dock, all the windows for that app would appear neatly in a grid. Now it’s all clustered together with no obvious way in mission control to spread out a window (app) cluster into an easy-to-view grid like I could in 10.6. Now, I have to select a contextual menu option (show all Windows) from the dock icon. I don’t get why they would have abandoned that neat feature or made it harder to access.
An easy solution to this issue would be to re-enable this feature by a click-and-hold on the app icon in Mission Control.
And how do I make Mission Control scriptable?

Posted by Joeyslaptop on October 10, 2011 at 13:52

@Chris: There’s no way to put different icons on each of your desktops at this stage (at least from what I’ve seen).
@Joey: I’m not sure you can make Mission Control scriptable. Apple needs to do that — your best bet is to send Apple feedback about Mac OS X.

Posted by Tony Arnold on October 10, 2011 at 14:26

@milton: I’m not sure you can. Honestly, I’ve really stopped trying to muck about with how Mission Control works under Lion and just roll with it — it appears to be a power user feature that no is no longer targeted at power users.
If you have requests like this, the best thing to do is to let Apple know directly.

Posted by Tony Arnold on October 11, 2011 at 08:55

HITONY…I’M A BIGFANOFYOURVIRTUEDESKTOP.…PLEASETELLMEYOUHAVESOMETHINGLIKEITFORSNOWLEOPARD I CANBUY.…sorry for caps… something with transitions

Posted by dennis on October 12, 2011 at 03:33

Great thread, only ‘tip’ or ‘how to’ (not sure if it can be done) is to switch desktops using a mouse (not a snazzy apple one) but a basic logitech one. With spaces if you put your mouse to the DT edge it would switch. If I am holding an app or something it works, any way without using the keyboard ctrl that you can switch with just the mouse. I have a hot corner set to MC, but that’s 2 clicks (call me lazy), but as a power user, it’s one click 2 many.
Thanks

Posted by Lance on October 26, 2011 at 01:23

Sorry, this conversation has finished.

This post is a bit old now, so I've closed the conversation. If you're keen to keep talking about it, please email me directly.