How to Merge All Windows Into Tabs on Mac

An afternoon of clicking leaves you with ten Finder windows and a Safari window on every desktop. You don't have to close anything: one menu command gathers every window of an app into a single tabbed window, nothing lost. It's called Merge All Windows, and it's been hiding in the Window menu for years.

The command

1. Click into any window of the app — say, Finder.
2. In the menu bar, open Window → Merge All Windows.

Every open window of that app collapses into one window with a tab bar across the top — each former window is now a tab, contents intact. In Finder, each tab keeps its folder; in Safari, each keeps its page (a window that already had multiple tabs contributes all of them); in TextEdit or Preview, each keeps its document, unsaved edits included.

It works identically on macOS 13 Ventura, 14 Sonoma, and 15 Sequoia, and there's no confirmation step — the merge just happens. It's per-app: merging Finder windows does nothing to Safari's. And macOS won't merge different apps' windows into one — tabs never mix apps.

Which apps have it

Any app using the system's standard tab support: Finder, Safari, TextEdit, Preview, Pages, Numbers, Keynote, Terminal, Maps, and plenty of third-party document apps. If Window → Merge All Windows is missing or grayed out, the app either doesn't support tabs or currently has only one window — there's nothing to merge.

The command reaches every eligible window of the app, including ones parked on other desktops — which makes it a handy way to gather an app's windows scattered across Spaces back into one place without visiting each Space yourself.

Un-merging: get a window back

Merging isn't a one-way door:

• Drag a tab down and away from the tab bar — it pops out into its own window, exactly the reverse of the merge.
• Or select the tab and choose Window → Move Tab to New Window.
• To un-merge everything at once, drag tabs out one by one — there's no "split all" command, which is a good argument for merging deliberately rather than habitually.

Living in a tabbed window

• Ctrl + Tab / Ctrl + Shift + Tab — next and previous tab.
• Cmd + W — close the current tab only; Cmd + Option + W closes the window and every tab in it.
• Drag tabs left and right along the bar to reorder them.
• In Finder, you can drag files onto a tab to move them into that folder — hover a moment and the tab opens.

One habit worth building: merge at the end of a research session instead of closing windows you might need. You keep everything, but your desktop and Mission Control go from chaos to one tidy rectangle.

Finder is where the command earns its keep: merge a pile of folder windows into one tabbed window, then move files between folders by dragging them from tab to tab — a two-pane file manager improvised out of stock Finder. In Safari, merging is the fix for the "one window per errand" habit; after the merge, Shift + Cmd + \ opens the tab overview so you can survey and prune everything you just gathered.

Stop the pile from forming

Merging cures the symptom. The cause — every document opening its own window — has a setting: System Settings → Desktop & Dock → Prefer tabs when opening documents → Always. With that on, new documents join the existing window as tabs from the start, and Merge All Windows becomes a rare cleanup instead of a daily chore.