Managing Windows 10’s virtual desktops

Finally, we come back to the “task view” icon on the taskbar, and the virtual desktops they help create. 

Clicking the “task view” button brings up a collection of apps on top, as well as a slideshow view of different virtual desktops on the bottom. A virtual desktop is nothing more than a screenful of snapped apps. One Microsoft executive described it as a poor man’s multimonitor setup, with users switching back and forth between these virtual screens of collected apps. Clicking a virtual desktop navigates to it, or you can type CTRL+WIN+ the right or left arrow, where WIN stands for the Windows key. You can also click the application on top, and jump directly to that desktop, and that app.

Creating a desktop, however, is still somewhat frustrating. Filling a single screen is easy enough, as you can open up an Internet Explorer window, for example, snap it to the right, and open up Xbox Music next to it. 

But let’s say you go a little crazy, open up a number of windows, then want to organize them into virtual desktops afterward. Once a window is opened in one virtual desktop, there’s no way, apparently, to shift it to another. It seems like your best bet is open a second desktop, then try and open up another instance of the app inside that desktop. (To open a second, separate browser window, for example, right-click the Internet Explorer icon.) Update 10/2: Readers have pointed out that you can right-click an app window and select "Move to..." to shift between virtual desktops.

But swiping in from the left, which showed your recently opened apps in Windows 8, now shows all your open apps, not your most recent ones. That may annoy some of you.