Self Service
organise your desktop
El Capitan has lots of new features that let you organise the layout of your apps and make the most of your screen real estate.
In System Preferences > General, there’s an option to automatically hide and show the menu bar, just like you could already do with the Dock.
To run several apps full-screen at once, just press the Mission Control key on your keyboard (the one showing three rectangles), then drag an app to an empty spot in the Spaces bar at the top of the screen. Switch between desktops using ≈+“and ≈+‘. Drag the space back to the lower part of the screen to return the app(s) it contains to windows.
If you want two apps on the screen with no other distractions, press the Mission Control key and drag one app to the Spaces bar, then another onto it there. They’ll be grouped together in Split View.
If you normally want your email app squashed down to an inconspicuous window but to be much larger for actually reading emails, open System Preferences > Dock and then set ‘Double-click a window’s title bar to’ to ‘zoom’. You can now toggle between two sizes that you set by doubleclicking a window’s title bar.
In full-screen mode, you can click outside of the composition window to minimise it to the bottom of the screen, enabling you to refer to other messages.