Effortless MacOS Desktop Navigation: Boost Your Productivity and Master Your Workflow

Introduction

Any one who has used a mac knows that the whole MacOS experience revolves around the concept of desktops. Desktops are a way to organize your workflow, and keep your work organized.

The problem is that most people don’t use desktops to their full potential. Most of us rely on multiple 3-finger swipes on the trackpad to navigate to the desktop we want.

In this blog post, I will show you some shortcuts that you can enable to make this process effortless.

Desktop Shortcuts

Enable Desktop Shortcuts

First, we need to enable the desktop shortcuts, before that make sure you have 9 desktops added, like shown below,

If you don’t know how to add a desktop, swipe up with 3 fingers on your trackpad, and click the + icon on the top right corner.

Now, to enable the shortcuts, follow the steps below,

Open System Preferences
Go to Keyboard
Click on Keyboard Shortcuts... button
Go to Mission Control
Enable the following shortcuts
- Move left a space
- Move right a space
- Switch to Desktop 1
- Switch to Desktop 2
- Switch to Desktop 3
- Switch to Desktop 4
- Switch to Desktop 5
- Switch to Desktop 6
- Switch to Desktop 7
- Switch to Desktop 8
- Switch to Desktop 9

How to use the shortcuts

Now that you have enabled the shortcuts, you can use them to navigate to the desktop you want.

You can use crtl + 1 to always go back to desktop-1 no matter where you are.

You can leverage this to make workflows around it, for example, I have my terminal always open on desktop 1, a browser on desktop 2, work related stuff on desktop 3, and so on.

I can always go back to my terminal by pressing ctrl + 1, and go back to my browser by pressing ctrl + 2.

ctrl + left arrow - Go to the desktop on the left
ctrl + right arrow - Go to the desktop on the right
ctrl + up arrow - Go open mission control
ctrl + 1 - Go to desktop 1
ctrl + 2 - Go to desktop 2
ctrl + 3 - Go to desktop 3
ctrl + 4 - Go to desktop 4
ctrl + 5 - Go to desktop 5
ctrl + 6 - Go to desktop 6
ctrl + 7 - Go to desktop 7
ctrl + 8 - Go to desktop 8
ctrl + 9 - Go to desktop 9

Conclusion

I hope you found this blog post useful, and you can use this to boost your productivity and master your workflow.