There’s apps I want to have full screen or filled screen and then there’s apps I want to be with other apps.
I use Cmd-Tab more than anything to swap between apps. And a trackpad swipe to move between virtual desktops.
All my Macs have multiple displays, I tend to be perpetually surprised by the virtual desktops I do have up, I guess I don’t have any approach that is consistent about them. I could see Stage Manager encouraging a consistent approach but it just eats up too much space. On my Mac I still miss an app called Sticky Windows which automatically collapsed apps to a tab on the edge of a screen when you moved to another app.
I hypothesize that Stage Manager grew out of Apple’s AR research, and the company decided to deploy it to other window-able (is that a word?) platforms, both because they thought it was cool and to offer a consistent window-management paradigm across platforms when they did come out with their goggles.
I can see it working for AR, where you’ve got the third dimension to play with, and where the third dimension requires more discipline to make sense of your window-placement options.
Tried Stage Manager on the Mac but didn’t like it. All those windows jumping in and out all at once was too much and it seemed too confusing on how to get the right sets of windows from different apps together and then change the mix. Plus, you lose screen real estate to keep the off stage icons open for use. If I want different window sets, I just scroll through multiple desktops, something introduced quite a while ago that seems to make Stage Manager redundant.
I love stage manager. Had tried Mission Control at various times, but found it hard to work with things I could not see. I use a 4K monitor, and stage manager uses space that I don’t oherwise use, and keeps recent window to view. I love it.
In the other thread on this I said I hadn’t really tried this on my Mac and was going to do so. I have now been using it several days and will definitely carry on using it.
I have seen it said that it doesn’t work well on small screens and I am using a 13” M2 MBA. I really like that if I have multiple windows open and piled on top of each other (as they have to be on a small screen) Stage manager moves them to the side icons where they are easily accessible.
This is a problem when I actually want more than one window open to make a composite screenshot, so I have to turn off SM to do this but most of the time it is on.
If the window that you want to include is at the top of one of the side staged window stacks, you can shift-click the stack to add that window (not all of them; just the top one) into the current active set of windows.
I tried it when it was first introduced and found it frustrating on small screens, like a 13" laptop. It’s better on a 5K screen, but still had some quirks that I never quite became accustomed to dealing with. I hope it improves across releases. While it wasn’t mentioned in the Sonoma introduction at WWDC, I look forward to seeing if there are any improvements.
For now, I tend to use multiple spaces for project or task separation.
I use it on my 32-inch Pro Display since there’s plenty of excess space to use it properly. Tried it on my 13-inch M2 MBA and turned it off immediately, used up too much of the valuable screen space.
I keep an XRG window open and unobstructed on the left side of my screen so I can see at a glance what’s going on with CPU, disk and network usage. Stage Manager obscures that window, so it’s a non-starter for me.
Do not use Stage Manager. I run a Windows VM in Parallels desktop and Stage Manager’s behavior is not amenable to how I need to see multiple windows displayed simultaneously in one of the Windows apps I use.
Unless there is a way that Mission Control can be told to organize desktops: Total Spaces is it for me. I have 12 desktops in a 4x3 grid. That means that each has a location that I can memorize.
I feel like this poll needs more granularity. I use it on the rare occasion when I need to focus, but still want some kind of quick switching tasking. That makes it once a month at most. Other times, it is more in the way.
Obviously my answer was no, I don’t use it. 