How to Set All Mac Apps to Prefer Tabs with New Document and Windows

How to Set All Mac Apps to Prefer Tabs with New Document and Windows

Tabs are useful and ubiquitous, whether for web browsing, the Finder, text editing and word processing, Mail, or any other apps they may appear, tabs help to reduce window and document clutter by bringing many different documents or windows into a single window with a tab bar. Many modern Mac apps support tabs nowadays, but often you have to manually set each app to use tabs when opening additional documents or new windows. But theres another way, by using a little-known Mac system setting that tells Mac apps to prefer using tabs for new windows and documents whenever possible. Precisely, this trick offers a single setting for all possible apps apps to prefer tabs with opening documents new or old, or creating new documents. If the Mac app supports tabs, it should respect this system setting toggle and not require individual app-specific fiddling. Now open any app which supports tabs; , , , Safari, , Keynote, etc, and open a new window or open a document. The opened item will appear as a tab by default, rather than as a separate window. The great thing about this setting is that you can enable it once in System Preferences, and it will carry over to all apps that support tabs whenever possible, so you wont need to fidget with individual app preferences and settings for defaulting to tabs. * There are other settings options available for Prefer tabs when opening documents to suit your user preferences; Always, In Full Screen Only, and Manually, if you only want to prefer tabs when apps are full screen then choose that option instead, and if you dont like tabs much youll probably want to go for Manually so that you can avoid them. Obviously this tutorial is aiming for the Always option, which is why were focusing on that here. Remember, this is prefer tabs, not require tabs. That means not all apps will respect the preference, and obviously if an app does not support tabs in the first place this setting will have no effect on that app too. Note this tab preference feature is only available in the more modern versions of Mac OS, and older Mac system software does not support the capability. Personally I really like tabs and find them very useful for managing individual apps with many documents and items open. If youre in the same boat, youll likely enjoy , which span across many apps and both major Apple OS platforms.