IkunaHow to Stop macOS From Rearranging Your Spaces (and Restore Them After Restart)
macOS Spaces was designed to be reorganized on the fly, not preserved as a stable arrangement. There is one setting that stops most of it, and a few habits that stop the rest.
You spend twenty minutes setting up your Desktops the way you like them. Then you open Figma in fullscreen and macOS silently inserts a new Space between Desktop 2 and Desktop 3. Or you restart your Mac and the order has shifted. Or you plug in your external monitor and half your Spaces have relocated to it.
Here is the setting that stops most of it, what still breaks the order, and the bigger question of whether you should be relying on Space order at all.
The one setting that stops most of the shuffling
macOS has a preference called Automatically rearrange Spaces based on most recent use. When it's on, macOS moves your most-used Spaces to the left. That is the single biggest cause of Spaces changing order without your permission.
Open System Settings → Desktop & Dock → Mission Control and uncheck Automatically rearrange Spaces based on most recent use. After this, Spaces stop reordering themselves during a session.
What still causes Spaces to change
Even with auto-rearrange off, some things still change your Space order. Fullscreen apps insert new Spaces: when you enter fullscreen mode in any app, macOS creates a new Space and slots it into your Space list, and when you exit, that Space disappears, shifting the numbers of any Spaces to the right of it. Displays have separate Spaces: when that Mission Control toggle is on, each monitor has its own Space list, and when you disconnect a monitor, its Spaces get merged onto your remaining display, often at the end of the list. Restarts wipe Space names and rearrangements entirely: macOS does not persist Space customizations. Sleep-and-wake with external monitors reassigns Spaces unpredictably. And point updates occasionally reset Mission Control preferences.
If your workflow assumes Desktop 3 is your messaging Desktop, fullscreening Figma temporarily makes it Desktop 4. Use maximize instead: hold the green button to resize without creating a new Space.
Two paths from here
Path 1: keep using Spaces and mitigate the failures. Turn off auto-rearrange, enable Displays have separate Spaces only if you actually work across multiple monitors, avoid fullscreen mode for apps whose Space position you care about, and accept that restarts and monitor changes will occasionally break the arrangement. This works if you use two or three Spaces, keep the workflow simple, and don't restart often. Path 2: stop relying on Space order as the persistence layer. The reason Space order keeps shifting is that macOS treats Spaces as a lightweight UI convenience, not as a saved state. If your projects require a stable working environment across restarts, monitor changes, and sleep-wake cycles, the honest answer is that macOS Spaces was never designed to provide that.
How to sidestep Space order entirely
A workspace tool solves the underlying need (restoring a full working context on demand) without depending on where each app happens to be in the Space list. With Ikuna, you save the state of your current setup (every app, every window position across displays, browser tabs and profiles, and your Focus Mode) as a named workspace. When you switch to that workspace, everything opens in the right place regardless of what Space macOS is currently on. Restart your Mac, plug in a different monitor, wake from sleep: click the workspace and the context returns. You still have your Spaces; Ikuna doesn't replace them. It just means which Space is which stops being the thing you rely on.
This survives what Spaces don't because the workspace is stored explicitly on your Mac (with iCloud sync across Macs since Ikuna 1.1), window positions are captured per-display and restored per-display, browser tabs are saved with their profiles so Chromium browsers restore the right project view, and Focus Mode is set on switch.
Doing it with Ikuna
Ikuna stores your workspace explicitly instead of relying on macOS Spaces to remember it. Free for up to 4 workspaces on macOS 13+; Pro is €9/month or €70/year for unlimited (no lifetime deal).
- Explicit saved state: apps, window positions across displays, browser tabs and profiles, and Focus Mode, saved as a named workspace.
- Survives restart, sleep, and monitor changes: the context returns regardless of what Space macOS is currently on.
- Per-display restore: window positions come back per-display when the monitor reappears.
- Spaces stay yours: Ikuna does not reorder or assign macOS Spaces. It works at the layer above them.
Native macOS · Local data · Built in EU
Common questions
My Spaces reorder themselves every time I open Mission Control.
This is the auto-rearrange setting. If it's off and reordering still happens, one of the fullscreen apps in your workflow is creating and destroying a Space each time.
How do I restore my Space arrangement after a Mac restart?
You can't restore Space arrangement itself; macOS does not persist it. You can restore what was on each Space using a workspace tool by saving one workspace per Space's worth of setup and restoring them after login.
Can I name my Spaces?
Not natively. Third-party tools can add a menu-bar label per Space, but the underlying Space itself has no persistent name in macOS.
Do I need to turn off Displays have separate Spaces?
Only if the split-per-monitor behavior is causing you problems. On a single monitor it doesn't matter. On multi-monitor, some workflows prefer everything on one Space list; others prefer per-monitor Spaces.
Will an app like Ikuna control macOS Spaces directly?
No. Ikuna does not reorder or assign macOS Spaces. It works at a different layer: saving and restoring the apps, windows, and context that would otherwise live inside those Spaces.