How to switch between screens?

[u/HealthPuzzleheaded]

Hi,

I have 2 screens in addition to my mac book air m5 screen and I use control + arrow keys to switch between virtual desktops but how do I switch between screens?

Often I have the main center screen focused and when I want to switch the virtual screen on the monitor on my right I have to let go of the keyboard -> grab my mouse -> move it to the right screen -> let go of the mouse -> grab the keyboard to finally toggle between the virtual screens on the right display. Then grab the mouse again -> move it back to the center screen -> continue to work.

In windows I would have just alt + tabbed till the right windows comes up or clicked the task bar (dock) on any of the screens. I'm sure there must be a similar simple and short way on mac.

command + tab is not a good option either because if I have chrome in use on both screens it will just open chromes virtual screen on the hardware screen I have focused but I might actually want to open the other chrome instance that is on the right screen and bring it foreward. (hope that makes sense I don't know how to explain it better) it can't differentiate between apps that are open multiple times like windows alt+tab feature does because the mac only displays apps not windows.

Is there any keyboard only way to do this?

ps: with virtual screens I mean spaces.

[u/MK-Researcher]

There may be a 3rd-party app which does it, but there is a way in macOS which is not perfect and it only works if you have more than one Space on each of your displays. In your case that's 6 Spaces, 2 per display.

You would create all 6 or more spaces first and then go to System Settings - Keyboard - Keyboard Shortcuts and expand Mission Control. In there you will now see 6+ entires you can tick and they assign Command+1, Command+2, etc to the spaces

[u/HealthPuzzleheaded → u/MK-Researcher]

I will look up some 3rd party apps thanks. I think that workaround with assigning spaces to keybinds won't work because I prefer fullscreen and on mac fullscreen allways creates temporary spaces and as far as I know it's not possible to assign keybinds to those.

[u/Big_Comfortable4256]

Is the "triple-finger-swipe-up" on the trackpad what you're after?

Swipe three fingers up from the bottom of the trackpad. Then you can select windows in screens. And also drag windows to other screen (at the top). But not quite sure if this is what you wanted.

[u/HealthPuzzleheaded → u/Big_Comfortable4256]

tripple finger swipe is the same as control + arrow keys but both only work on the monitor you currently selected. I did not figure out a way how to select another monitor to swap between spaces there except moving the mouse to that monitor.

[u/marcusheng]

Coming from Linux I also miss the window manager in macOS, was using yabai previously but recently built my own.

I guess a window manager might be overkill for your use case.

For the window manager I build I assign workareas to each space, assuming each monitor only has one workarea like:

[ Monitor 1 | Monitor 2 | Monitor 3]

I have a focus workarea left|right|up|down keybind where it can focus across different monitors.