everyday mac tools

Stop a Mac rearranging your desktops and Spaces on its own

· 6 min read

If your desktops change order every time you open Mission Control, one setting is responsible: System Settings, Desktop & Dock, then in the Mission Control section switch off “Automatically rearrange Spaces based on most recent use”. After that, desktops stay in the order you put them, and shortcuts that jump to Desktop 2 or Desktop 3 land in the same place every time.

Why the Mac moves your Spaces around

macOS is trying to help. With the setting on, it keeps the Spaces you used most recently next to each other, on the theory that the one you just left is the one you will want next. If you use two desktops loosely, you never notice. If you build a layout on purpose (mail on the first desktop, the main project on the second, reference material on the third), the layout drifts during the day and your muscle memory stops working.

The drift is most obvious with full-screen apps. Every app in full screen gets a Space of its own, and with the setting on, macOS moves that Space to sit beside whichever desktop you came from. Leave it for an hour, come back, and it may be somewhere else in the row.

Turn off automatic rearranging

These steps are for macOS 13 Ventura and later, where the old Mission Control pane became part of Desktop & Dock.

  1. Open the Apple menu and choose System Settings.
  2. Click Desktop & Dock in the sidebar.
  3. Scroll down to the Mission Control heading.
  4. Switch off Automatically rearrange Spaces based on most recent use.

The change applies straight away, with no restart. On macOS 12 Monterey and earlier, the same checkbox is in System Preferences, Mission Control.

Turning it off stops future shuffling. It does not put your desktops back in the order you wanted, so do that next.

Put the desktops back in order

  1. Open Mission Control. Press Control-Up Arrow, press the Mission Control key on an Apple keyboard, or swipe up on the trackpad with the number of fingers set in Trackpad settings.
  2. Move the pointer to the row along the top. That is the Spaces bar, and the thumbnails grow when you hover over it.
  3. Drag a desktop thumbnail left or right to where you want it. Full-screen app Spaces can be dragged the same way.
  4. To add a desktop, click the plus button at the right end of the bar. To remove one, hover over it and click the close button that appears. Any windows on it move to another desktop; nothing closes.

macOS does not let you name desktops; they are simply numbered left to right. The practical workaround is a different wallpaper on each one. Switch to a desktop, open System Settings, Wallpaper, and choose an image: the choice applies to that desktop only, so you can tell them apart at a glance.

The other switches in that section

The Mission Control section has three more settings. They cause different kinds of jumping, and people often blame the wrong one.

  • When switching to an application, switch to a Space with open windows for the application. With this on, choosing an app from the Dock or with Command-Tab takes you to the desktop where its windows already are. If the screen seems to leap sideways whenever you change apps, this is the switch. With it off, you stay where you are and the app becomes active, but its windows stay on their own desktop, so you may see only its menu bar.
  • Group windows by application. This changes how windows are laid out in the Mission Control overview. It has no effect on the order of your Spaces.
  • Displays have separate Spaces. With two or more displays, each gets its own row of desktops. Turn it off and the displays switch desktops together. Changing it requires logging out, and most people with more than one display are better off leaving it on.

Pin apps to a desktop and jump there from the keyboard

A stable order is half the fix. The other half is making apps open where you expect them.

  1. Open the app and move to the desktop you want it to live on.
  2. Right-click (or Control-click) its icon in the Dock.
  3. Choose Options, then under Assign To pick This Desktop.

The other choices are All Desktops, for a window you want to follow you everywhere, and None, the default, which lets the app open wherever you happen to be. With more than one display you will also see an option for a desktop on a particular display. The assignment is remembered, so the next time the app opens it goes straight to its desktop.

With the order fixed, numbered shortcuts become reliable too:

  1. Open System Settings, Keyboard, and click Keyboard Shortcuts.
  2. Choose Mission Control in the list on the left.
  3. Expand the Mission Control entry and tick Switch to Desktop 1, Switch to Desktop 2 and so on. They default to Control-1, Control-2 and upward.

These entries only appear for desktops that already exist, so create the desktops first. Control-Left Arrow and Control-Right Arrow, which move one desktop at a time, are on by default.

The Terminal version

The setting is stored as a Dock preference, which is useful if you keep a setup script for new Macs:

defaults write com.apple.dock mru-spaces -bool false
killall Dock

mru-spaces stands for most recently used Spaces. Restarting the Dock applies the change; your windows are unaffected. To return to the default:

defaults delete com.apple.dock mru-spaces
killall Dock

What defaults write does, and how to undo one safely explains how these commands work and how to keep a record of what you changed.

If you are tuning Mission Control more generally, Mainspring has a faster Mission Control power-up among its 90+ reversible settings, each snapshotted so it flips back in one click, and scenes that can switch a set of settings when you connect a display. For the rearranging problem on its own, the switch above is all you need.

Questions

Why are my desktops rearranging again after I turned the setting off? Check the switch first, in case it has been turned back on. If it keeps coming back after updates, Mac settings that revert after a macOS update covers how to spot it. If the switch is still off and the screen still jumps, the cause is almost always the “switch to a Space with open windows” setting described above.

Will turning it off change anything about full-screen apps? They still get their own Space. The difference is that the Space stays where it was created instead of moving next to the desktop you last used. You can drag it anywhere in the Spaces bar.

Can I keep one app visible on every desktop? Yes. Right-click its Dock icon, choose Options, and pick All Desktops under Assign To. It suits a notes window or a music player; it gets crowded quickly with more than one or two apps.

Is there a limit to how many desktops I can have? There is a limit, but it is far more than most people find useful. Beyond four or five, a numbered shortcut for each is what keeps them manageable.