Use Spaceman to Monitor Your Mac’s Virtual Desktops
Mission Control, a feature of macOS, offers multiple desktops. You can switch between desktops using a keyboard shortcut, swiping across the trackpad, or opening Mission Control itself. This is great for multitasking—you can put different parts of your workflow in different places—but it’s easy to forget the feature is there. Part of the problem: You can’t tell at a glance which desktop you’re currently using.
The free and open source Spaceman app fixes that. This app sits in the menu bar and shows squares representing your virtual desktops: your current desktop is black, the others are gray. If you wish, you can add numbers or even names to each desktop for more context.
To get started, download the latest version from Github and install it. Launch the application and it will open in the menu bar. I recommend moving it to the right by holding down the Command key and dragging it, but obviously the placement is up to you.
This app shows not only your Mission Control desktops, but any apps you have open in full screen mode, which can help you keep track of multiple full screen windows if you do this frequently.
You can customize the appearance a bit. By default, you’ll see rectangles for each desktop; instead you can see a rectangle with a number on it, or just a number if you want, or you can set custom names for each desktop. Names can only be three letters long, which takes up a bit of space, but it’s enough to give you an idea of what you typically use each desktop for.
In this example, I use the first desktop for writing, the second for research, the third for communication, and the fourth for entertainment. This can help you mentally separate out what each space is for.
I wish Spaceman didn’t need to exist – ideally something like this would be offered by macOS itself. I would also like to click on the rectangles to go to the desktop, just like it works on Linux systems. I think other than those two points there’s nothing to complain about – Spaceman solves the problem without getting in your way, and it’s all free.