Keyboard Shortcuts to Switch Desktops on Mac

Ctrl-Right and Ctrl-Left walk you through your desktops one at a time — but the shortcut worth setting up is Ctrl plus a number, which jumps straight to any Space. It ships disabled, and it only appears in Settings once you have extra desktops. Here's the full keyboard toolkit for Spaces.

The shortcuts that work out of the box

• Ctrl + Right / Ctrl + Left — move one Space right or left, in the order shown in Mission Control's top bar. Full-screen apps count as Spaces, so they're in the rotation too.
• Ctrl + Up — open Mission Control and click the desktop you want.
• Ctrl + Down — App Exposé (one app's windows; a different tool, same family).

Arrow-walking is fine with two or three desktops. With five, going from Desktop 1 to Desktop 5 means four keystrokes and four slide animations — that's the problem the numbered shortcuts solve, and the reason they're worth the one-time setup below.

Enable Ctrl+1 through Ctrl+9

1. Make sure you actually have extra desktops — the shortcuts only exist for Spaces that exist. Add desktops in Mission Control with the + button first.
2. Open System Settings → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts.
3. Select Mission Control in the sidebar, then expand the Mission Control group in the list.
4. Tick Switch to Desktop 1, Switch to Desktop 2, and so on — one checkbox per existing desktop.

Now Ctrl + 3 teleports you to Desktop 3 from anywhere — one keystroke, one slide, no animation tour of the desktops in between. If you add a sixth desktop later, revisit the same pane to tick its new checkbox.

Watch for conflicts: some apps use Ctrl+number for their own features (terminal tab switching is a common one). You can rebind either side — double-click the shortcut in this pane to record a different key.

Keep the numbers meaningful

Numbered shortcuts are only useful if Desktop 3 is always the same desktop. By default macOS reshuffles your Spaces based on recent use, which quietly breaks the mapping. Turn that off:

1. Open System Settings → Desktop & Dock.
2. Scroll to Mission Control.
3. Turn off Automatically rearrange Spaces based on most recent use.

Terminal equivalent, with undo:

# stop Spaces from reordering themselves
defaults write com.apple.dock mru-spaces -bool false
killall Dock

# undo: restore automatic rearranging
defaults delete com.apple.dock mru-spaces
killall Dock

Trackpad and mouse, for completeness

Four-finger (or three-finger) sideways swipes mirror the Ctrl-arrows, and a Magic Mouse two-finger swipe does the same. Both gestures live in System Settings → Trackpad → More Gestures, under Swipe between full-screen applications. The keyboard still wins on precision: a swipe can't jump straight to Desktop 4.

Full-screen apps, order, and motion

Ctrl-arrows travel the whole row you see in Mission Control — ordinary desktops first, then every full-screen and Split View app. That's why the shortcut sometimes lands you in a full-screen app you'd forgotten about: it's a Space too. The numbered shortcuts, by contrast, only target desktops.

Numbers refer to positions, not names. Drag Desktop 3's thumbnail ahead of Desktop 2 in Mission Control and their numbers swap — Ctrl + 2 now opens the desktop you just moved. Decide a fixed mental map (communications on 1, code on 2, notes on 3), arrange the thumbnails once to match, and let the rearranging toggle above keep it that way. This is the same reason to keep automatic rearranging off: with it on, macOS quietly renumbers your rooms behind your back.

If the slide animation between Spaces grates at high frequency, soften it: System Settings → Accessibility → Display → Reduce motion swaps the slide for a quick crossfade. Purely cosmetic — but heavy Space-switchers swear by it.

Complete the workflow

Once you can jump anywhere by number, learn to take windows with you — hold a title bar and press the same shortcuts: move a window to another desktop.