macOS Mojave: How to Use Stacks to Organise Your Desktop

BY Rajesh Pandey

Published 24 Jun 2018

macOS Mojave: How to Use Stacks to Organise Your Desktop

Apple has introduced a number of handy little features in macOS Mojave. One such feature is Stacks which helps in keeping your cluttered desktop clean by automatically organizing your shortcuts and files.

If you are someone who always ends up having a messy desktop with icons and files littered around, the Stacks feature in macOS Mojave is going to be a lifesaver for you. The feature will automatically ‘stack’ all the icons and files on your desktop to ensure it is always clean and organized. This should also make it easier for you to find the right files when you need it.

How to Use Stacks in macOS Mojave

Using Stacks in macOS Mojave is pretty simple. All you need to do is right-click on an empty area on your desktop and select the Use Stacks option. Mojave will then proceed to group all your files depending on their type. So, all the images littered on your desktop will be organized and put under the Images stack. Any new files or shortcut that you add to your desktop after enabling Stacks will automatically be added to the relevant stack as well. However, if no relevant stack exists for that file type, then its shortcut would continue to be displayed on your desktop as is.

None of the folders on your desktop will be put in any stack, though they will be aligned and sorted.

You can also change the way Stacks organizes your files. By default, stacks are created based on the file type and kind. However, you can also create stacks depending on the date added, date last opened, tags, and more.

macOS Mojabe Stacks Group

To do this, simply right-click on your desktop, select the Group Stacks By option and then select how you want stacks to stack the files and shortcuts on your desktop. You can even right-click on a stack and apply the same set of filters to files within it. So, if you want a stack to display your recently opened files first, you can apply that filter. Additionally, you can even right-click on a stack to create a new folder with all the files present in that particular stack.


Here’s a handy tip that will make the Stacks feature in macOS Mojave even more useful. If you are not already, make sure to start tagging all your files in macOS. This way, you can quickly create a new stack based on a particular tag which should help you quickly find the files you are looking for.

What do you think about the Stacks feature in macOS Mojave? Drop a comment and let us know!