MacOS Display – Moving Full Screen App to Second Monitor

displayfullscreenmacos

In Mac OS X El Capitan, is there a shortcut to move full screen apps between monitors?

My current method is first bringing the app out of full screen mode, then drag it to the second monitor and then maximize it again.

I wish there was a shortcut to just move it from monitor 1 to monitor 2.

edit: I'm not talking about moving between workspaces on a single monitor… I am talking about 2 monitors.

Best Answer

You can use Mission Control (formerly known as Exposé) to move full screen apps across monitors. Mission Control initially shows lists of workspaces across the top of all monitors, and when you move the mouse cursor up into that area they change into thumbnails. If you drag one of the thumbnails from one monitor to another, the workspace corresponding to that thumbnail moves to that monitor. A thumbnail for a primary desktop can be rearranged within its own monitor, but it can't be dragged to another monitor.

To clarify what I mean by primary desktop, each monitor initially has a workspace without full screen applications, and additional workspaces for full screen applications (which, in El Capitan, can contain one or two applications apiece). What I'm calling a primary desktop is that initial workspace. The + in the upper right corner of each monitor while Mission Control is active can create a new desktop, and a desktop created that way can be moved across monitors, but the desktop which was not created that way remains on its own monitor.

Keyboard shortcuts and trackpad gestures are available for Mission Control.

Related Solutions

MacOS – How to move to another full screen window of the same app

Just going into the main Mission control window will solve this, it will give a nice summary like view of all your open (fullscreen) windows. Another way to switch between fullscreen windows is selecting the "Window" menu item or the Safari icon in your dock and choosing the right window from there.

Edit

If you want to use a keyboard shortcut to accomplish this you can use an application that binds a keyboard shortcut to an Apple script, like FastScripts. The next step is placing the script in your /Library/Scripts folder and adding a shortcut to the script in the FastScripts preferences.

I'm not really good with Apple scripts, but this is a sort of working script that I made:

tell application "Safari"
activate
end tell

tell application "System Events"
    tell process "Safari"
        tell menu bar 1
            tell menu bar item "Venster"
                tell menu "Venster"
                    click menu item 14
                end tell
            end tell
        end tell
    end tell
end tell

The big problem with this script is this: The line click menu item 14 will make the first window that you see when you click on the "Window" menu item active, and changing it to click menu item 15 will make the second window active. However, obviously, this isn't included in my code, and I don't have the time to work on it today, so you can either ask someone else how to do this or wait until tomorrow.

Run Google Chrome in full screen with dev console across dual-monitors

Doesn't work as the implementation of Fullscreen-scaling in OSX (10.7, 10.8) currently only covers single-windows. Either Chrome provides its own implementation which could in fact display two windows over two displays, or - let's cross fingers - Apple implements this somewhere around 10.9 :)

Best Answer

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MacOS – How to move to another full screen window of the same app

Run Google Chrome in full screen with dev console across dual-monitors

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