Which desktop am I on?

Why it is hard to tell

Desktops on a Mac look identical by design: same menu bar, same Dock, same wallpaper unless you changed it. Switch with a swipe or ⌃→ and the only thing that moved is the windows. If you keep five or ten desktops, “which one is this?” comes up a dozen times a day, and Apple ships no indicator for it. The number is not in the menu bar, not in the Dock, not in System Settings.

Four ways to tell

1. Open Mission Control. ⌃↑, F3, or a three-finger swipe up. The current desktop’s thumbnail is highlighted in the row along the top. This works everywhere and costs a second each time.
2. Give each desktop a wallpaper. Right-click the desktop → Change Wallpaper. A colour per desktop turns the question into a glance, as long as there is some desktop showing between the windows.
3. Pin apps to desktops. Dock → right-click an app → Options → This Desktop. Which app you are looking at then tells you where you are, until you open it somewhere else.
4. Put the name in the menu bar. Doorplate, Spaceman, WhichSpace and CurrentKey all add a menu bar item that shows the current desktop. Spaceman and WhichSpace are free and open source and show a number or a short label; Doorplate shows the full name, an icon and a color, and carries the same name into Mission Control.

What Doorplate adds

• The menu bar tile. The desktop’s color, icon and name, always in view. Click it for every desktop and the apps living on each.
• The switch tag. When you land on a desktop by swipe, shortcut or click, its name appears for a moment in the middle of the screen (or top, or bottom), so you never have to look up.
• The hover strip. Rest the pointer at the top edge and a strip of every desktop slides in with the current one marked. Click to jump.
• Jump back. ⌃⌥⇥ returns to the desktop you were on before, which turns “where was I?” into a keystroke.

All of it reads the same names, so once a desktop is called Mail, the tile says Mail, the tag says Mail, and Mission Control says Mail. Renaming takes a few seconds.

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