Stack windows by app in Mission Control on Mac

If you'd rather see one neat pile per app in Mission Control than every window spread across the screen, the setting you want is Group windows by application in System Settings → Desktop & Dock. Switch it on and each app's windows collapse into a single stack, labelled with the app's name. Here's how to enable it and how to read the stacks.

What a stack looks like

With stacking on, Mission Control stops giving every window its own tile. Instead, each application gets one spot, and if it has more than one window they're drawn as an overlapping pile — the frontmost window on top, the others fanned slightly behind it — with the app's icon and name sitting just beneath. Ten windows across five apps no longer read as ten scattered rectangles; they read as five labelled stacks, and you can tell at a glance which apps have several windows open and which have just one.

Apps with a single open window still appear as a single thumbnail — there's nothing to stack. The piling only kicks in where it earns its keep: the apps you keep three or four windows in, like a browser or a text editor, where a stack is far calmer than a spray of look-alike tiles.

Turn stacking on

1. Open System Settings and click Desktop & Dock.
2. Scroll to the Mission Control section.
3. Turn on Group windows by application.

The stacks appear the next time you open Mission Control — no restart, no logout. The setting sits in the same place and behaves the same way on macOS 13 Ventura, 14 Sonoma, and 15 Sequoia.

Or flip it in Terminal

The toggle maps to one key in the Dock's preferences. Setting it directly is handy for setup scripts or when you're already in a shell:

# Stack each app's windows into one pile in Mission Control
defaults write com.apple.dock expose-group-apps -bool true
killall Dock

Restarting the Dock with killall Dock is what makes the change stick; it doesn't close or move any of your windows. To unstack and go back to spread-out tiles, write the false value and restart again:

# Undo — unstack, spread windows back out
defaults write com.apple.dock expose-group-apps -bool false
killall Dock

How to work a stack

• Hover to fan it out. Rest the pointer on a stack and its windows spread apart enough to see each one clearly, so you can pick the exact window rather than guessing from the top thumbnail.
• Click the top to raise the app. Clicking a stack brings that window forward; if you just want any window of that app, the top of the pile is the one you last used.
• Read the label. The app name under each stack is the fastest identifier — you're matching a word, not a picture, which is quicker under a crowded screen.

Stacking versus merging into tabs

Stacking is a viewing choice — it doesn't actually combine your windows. If you'd rather permanently fold an app's windows into one, see how to merge all windows on Mac, which pulls a document app's windows into a single tabbed window.