Basic stage manager help needed

[martin2345uk]

I have started using stage manager as an alternative to the dock, to give me more screen real estate on my M1 Air.

Is there a way to have all open windows show in it? Currently for example it only shows me 4 applications:

But I have more applications open that this...

Thank you!

 

[ignatius345]

Do you mean that you want to see more windows in the sidebar there? It should be showing you everything, unless you're hiding apps. Sometimes windows are a bit hidden in the sidebar because they're in groups, but if you click the little "app icon" part, it will expand. Note that if you want to ADD a given window from the sidebar into your main view, hold down SHIFT and click on it.

Easier to show in screenshots:

Here's what the sidebar looks like. Click on the app icon part (don't know what that's really called) for a particular group to get more detail.



Then it expands, and you can see the other windows more clearly:

 

[martin2345uk]

Hi, mine definitely only shows a maximum of 4 items in the stage manager side bar! For example it currently does not show Excel, when I have an active and open Excel window.

Is this some kind of limitation of the M1 Air maybe?

 

[nmt1900]

It looks like it shows you 4 last used applications. If you open/access one that is not in this list then it will replace one of others.

In this way it can be helpful in workflow where up to 4 applications are involved.

 

[martin2345uk]

Yeah I guess so. Shame, as this makes it much less useful than it could be!

 

[ignatius345]

I'm seeing like 6 groups in the sidebar of my iMac. So it might be dependent on screen size?

But yeah, agree, it should show *everything* and scale down if necessary. Now that you mention it, I was looking for an app earlier that I knew was running and had an open window but wasn't visible in the sidebar.

I am very much hoping they improve Stage Manager instead of just leaving it as-is. It also really needs a way to quickly add a newly opened document to the set of windows that's open on screen.