Stage Manager is a pretty cool window management feature added in macOS Ventura, but it does take some getting used to, and it still needs some tweaks. One particular issue is the fact that it can be difficult to tell what’s in a window group, as the tiny preview on the left quickly becomes cluttered.
Stage View aims to solve this by generating a full preview of all these windows, letting you see, select, and manage items a bit more easily. It works quite well, but just like Stage Manager itself, it can feel clunky at first.
Previews for all grouped Stage Manager windows
The idea is simple enough. When two or more windows are in a group, you can hover the cursor over the unified preview to get separate views of all included windows. These will include the app’s icon and title, if available.
You can customize the size of the previews and add a short delay so that they are not displayed immediately. You can also prevent them from showing up for single windows, which I highly recommend, along with adding a delay.
Manage windows directly from previews
From the previews, you can close, minimize, and make windows full-screen. Additionally, you can change their order before switching to a group.
Once a preview has been displayed, clicking one of the windows will bring it to the foreground, and clicking a window again, any window, will switch to the group. Some documentation would be helpful for this feature, as it can be quite confusing at first.
A good addition to Stage Manager
In short, Stage View does a pretty good job, but the window selection feature may need some tweaks, or at least a bit of documentation to get users started. I would also recommend switching to Dark or Light mode from the app’s settings, as I feel they both look nicer than the default Classic mode.
What’s New:
Version 1.1:
Improved generation and updating of window previews
Fixed unexpected crashes when activating other applications (Telegram)
Compatibility: macOS 10.13 or later