There are two people in this world, those who keep their desktops organized and those who do not. Over the years I’ve learned these two kinds of users are about a 50/50 split and some do fall somewhere in between. By default, sending files directly to your desktop is often an easier option to grab files quickly. However, the number of files sitting on your desktop can quickly add up and take over, eliminating the ease of quickly accessing certain files you might need on a regular basis. The solution has arrived: Stacks. Stacks is a great way to appear completely neat and tidy when perhaps, your desktop is just the opposite.
Apple has used the term “Stack” before, and still does, in relation to how the icons of folders in the dock display, either as normal folders or as a stack of icons with the first on top. Mojave’s new Stacks feature brings that visual approach to the Desktop, organizing icon clutter into neat stacks that you can expand and collapse with a click, working with the revealed icons just as you’ve always done.
In the Finder, the best way to invoke Stacks is by Control-clicking the Desktop and choosing Use Stacks from the contextual menu. If you first click the Desktop, you can also find the commands for Stacks in the View menu: Use Stacks and Group Stacks By. Lastly, if you open the View Options window by Control-clicking the Desktop and choosing Show View Options, you can work with Stacks by choosing from the Stacks By pop-up menu.
When you invoke Stacks, the Finder promptly collects all like icons-even new files, as you create them – together into one of more stacks of icons. Click once on a stack to reveal its contents below. Click again to collapse the revealed icons back into the stack. If you open multiple stacks at once, each subsequent stacks takes over a spot at the top of the screen and expands down. If you don’t show disks on your Desktop, you can get a nice columnar view of what’s on your Desktop.
How does Stacks figure out which files are alike? You determine that by Control-clicking the Desktop and choosing from the Group Stacks By menu. You can create three basic types of Stacks:
- Kind: These stacks are named for the type of file they contain, such as Documents, PDF Documents, Movies, Images, Screenshots, etc.
- Date: With date based collections, each stack’s name and contents depend on what date ranges make sense, such as Today, Previous 7 Days, Previous 30 Days, October, 2017 and so on. The date groupings can key off the date added, last opened, last modified, or created.
- Finder tags: Tag-based stacks are useful only if you regularly assign tags to all your files.
For myself, grouping stacks by kind work the best, but I can see how for some date could work best. It’s really all in your own preferences and you can change things as needed.
How can you control the order of the files within a stack? That’s trickier. Control-click the Desktop, choose Show View Options, and in the View Options windows, choose from the Sort By pop-up menu. I’m partial to Name and Last Modified, but as mentioned earlier, it is what works best for you.
The only minor downside to Stacks, is that it eliminates any spatial memorization you have relied on to find icons on your Desktop. If you are like me, you do rely on this. I would often get frustrated with this method as well, especially if I had too many similar items stored on my desktop. Stacks really does help! Now I just click on the kind of file I am looking for, like a PDF, and then it expands neatly on my desktop. While I did try to keep my icons before in a specific order to memorize, this arrangement was imperfect much of the time as I added and removed icons.
Stacks might not be perfect, but I have found it to be a valuable feature to Mojave. If nothing else, it gives the impression that I am neat and organized!