Can I choose how the spaces are numbered across external monitors?
I use spaces a lot to organise the apps, so each space has a certain role, e.g. two spaces on the laptop for communications, e.g. mail and discord/slack.
I work in two different locations, a rented office, and my home office. In both locations, I have a similar setup. I use my MacBook and two external 4k monitors (not the same brand of monitors at the two locations – but in both cases, two identical monitors)
My workflow depends heavily on things being consistent, as I use keyboard shortcuts a lot to switch to the program needed for that task I need to carry out.
I have 10 spaces in total, 3 on the laptop, 4 on the center monitor, and 3 on the right. I have the following settings:
- “Automatically rearrange Spaces based on must recent use” is turned off (Necessary for the consistency needed)
- “Displays have separate Spaces” is turned on
I want my center monitor to be the “Main display”, so that automatically gets Space 1, 2, 3, and 4. (if the build-in display is the main display, I can get consistent numbering, see the p.s.)
But how Spaces are assigned to the other two monitors is not consistent between my two work locations. E.g. in my rented office, the build-in display gets Spaces 5, 6, and 7 – while in my home office, those space numbers are assigned to the right monitor; the build-in now has Spaces 8, 9, and 10.
Can I control the ordering in which the spaces are numbered on the different monitors?
I think that the answer is probably, “No”.
In my specific case, it’s a MacBook Pro M2 Max running MacOS 14.6.1.
This question seems to be a duplicate. However, the suggested solution has no effect in my case. I expect because I have one of the external displays as the “main display”
p.s. I do get consistent numbering if I set the Build-in display as the “Main display”, then they are numbered [1, 2, 3] [4, 5, 6, 7] [8, 9 10] in both locations. The primary problem here is that I do enjoy playing some games from time to time, and most of those I play currently only support full screen on the “Main Display”. So that would be a bit of an annoyance that I had to change main display before launching a game, and change it back afterwards.
p.p.s. In my current setup, the two LG monitors, which have HDMI connections (one using a USB-C HDMI adapter as the MacBook “only” has one HDMI port). I tried switching the cables, but that didn’t have an effect.