How to Navigate Mission Control in Sierra

1 ACTIVATE MISSION CONTROL

Activating Mission Control is done by swiping upwards with three fingers anywhere on your trackpad. Once you do this, all your open applications will spread to different corners of the desktop, showing you exactly what you have running. To return to a standard desktop, just swipe back down the same way.

4 MOVING APPS

If you have a lot of apps open, you might like to organise them onto different desktops to make them easier to manage. Open Mission Control and drag and drop an app into a new desktop at the top of the screen. Drop it onto the plus symbol at the top right and you’ll create a new desktop to drop the app into.

7 DASHBOARD SETTINGS

Dashboard is turned off by default in macOS Sierra. In the Mission Control settings, you can turn it back on and choose whether to overlay Dashboard onto your desktop or give it its own space. Choose an option and hit F12 to launch.

2 SWITCHING APPS

Once you activate Mission Control, your apps still run as normal in their minimised state, so videos will keep playing and web pages will continue to update. If you want to switch to a particular app, just click on it. This returns you to a standard application view, but with the app you selected in the foreground.

5 ADDING APP SPACES

You’re not limited to putting apps into desktop spaces — you can also drag them to the top bar and let them float in a space of their own. These apps don’t belong to a desktop: they can be accessed via Mission Control or the Option-Tab app switcher. You can drop another app on them to enter a Split View mode.

8 CHANGE SHORTCUTS

You can change the keyboard, trackpad or mouse shortcuts to Mission Control, Dashboard and Show Desktop in Mission Control settings but if you press the Shift, Control, Option or Command keys while looking through the list you’ll find, you can add these keys to the choices.

3 ADDING A NEW DESKTOP

With macOS, you’re not just limited to one desktop — you can have many desktop spaces. In Mission Control, simply move your cursor up to the top bar and it will expand to reveal them. To add a new desktop space, simply click on the ‘+’ in the right-hand corner. To delete a space, hover the cursor over it and click the ‘X’.

6 MISSION CONTROL SETTINGS

You can customise Mission Control in System Preferences. Open up System Preferences from the Dock and choose Mission Control in the top line of icons. Here, you can choose a different way of launching Mission Control from the pop-up menu. Try it!