How to Open Documents in Tabs Instead of Windows (Mac)

Open six text files and most Mac apps scatter six windows across your desktop. Browsers solved this years ago with tabs — and macOS has a system-wide switch that makes document apps behave the same way. One setting, and TextEdit, Pages, Preview, and friends start stacking documents into a single tabbed window.

Turn on Prefer tabs

1. Open System Settings → Desktop & Dock.
2. Scroll to the Windows section.
3. Set Prefer tabs when opening documents to Always.

The three choices, on macOS 13 through 15:

• Never — every document gets its own window, classic behavior.
• In Full Screen — the default. Documents open as tabs only when the app is in full screen (where separate windows would be useless anyway).
• Always — documents open as tabs whenever the app already has a window open. This is the browser-style behavior most people are looking for.

The change applies immediately, no restart needed, and it's just as easy to flip back to In Full Screen if you decide you miss separate windows.

Which apps respect it

Any app built on the Mac's standard document system picks this up automatically: TextEdit, Preview, Pages, Numbers, Keynote, Script Editor, and many third-party editors. Finder and Terminal have their own tab support with the same keystrokes. Apps with custom window handling — many Electron apps, for instance — ignore the setting and keep doing whatever they do.

There's no per-app version of this switch; it's system-wide. If one app should behave differently, check that app's own settings.

Finder is the special case: it has its own, separate toggle. In Finder → Settings → General, tick Open folders in tabs instead of new windows and double-clicking a folder with Cmd held opens it as a tab rather than a fresh window. The system-wide Prefer tabs setting and Finder's checkbox are independent, so set both if you want tab behavior everywhere. Terminal, likewise, decides for itself under its own Settings → General.

Working with tabs once you have them

• Cmd + T — new tab (in apps that support it; in document apps this creates a new untitled document as a tab).
• Ctrl + Tab and Ctrl + Shift + Tab — cycle forward and backward through tabs.
• Cmd + W — close the current tab; Cmd + Option + W closes the whole window, tabs and all.
• View → Show Tab Bar — most document apps can show the tab bar even with one document open, so you can drag files onto it.
• Window → Merge All Windows — gather every existing window of the app into one tabbed window; the perfect cleanup after a messy session.
• Drag a tab out of the tab bar (or Window → Move Tab to New Window) to split a document back into its own window — say, to put two documents side by side.

When Always is the wrong choice

Tabs trade visibility for tidiness: you can't see two tabbed documents at once. If your work is constant side-by-side comparison — two drafts, code and output — In Full Screen is the saner setting, and you can still tab up manually with Merge All Windows when a pile builds up. The setting only controls what happens when documents open; nothing stops you from mixing tabs and windows freely afterwards.

Already drowning in windows?

The setting only affects documents opened from now on. For the mess you already have, Merge All Windows pulls every open window of an app into one tabbed window in a single command.