With macOS Tahoe, Apple has made a drastic improvement to Control Center: you can now add, remove, and rearrange its controls. This represents a significant shift from previous versions, where certain controls were permanently located in Control Center, the options for adding controls were limited, and the order couldn’t be rearranged.
In this article, we’ll look at how you can add controls, remove the ones you don’t want, and arrange them in a way that makes sense for you. You can check our macOS Tahoe superguide for more information and tutorials. Here’s how to customize Control Center in macOS Tahoe.
- Tools required: macOS Tahoe
The Edit Controls button
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Before macOS Tahoe, Control Center was managed in System Settings, and your options were basically to turn on or off controls. That’s no longer the case in Tahoe. Now, there is an Edit Controls button at the bottom of Control Center. This button is the key to accessing the tools to manage Control Center.
Now that you know where the Control Center setting is, let’s look at how to remove, add, and rearrange Control Center.
Remove controls from Control Center
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Apple includes a default set of controls that it believes are the most popular ones with users. There is a little bit of room for you to add controls, but you can remove the controls you never use and create more space. For example, I never use Focus (which uses two slots; we’ll talk about the slots in the “Rearrange controls” section), so I removed it.
To remove a control, open Control Center and click the Edit Controls button. You’ll see “–” icons appear on the Control Center controls. This is just like removing apps from the Home screen in iOS; to remove a control, click on the control’s corresponding “–” icon.
Add controls to Control Center
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To add a control, click Edit Controls. In the middle of the screen, you’ll see a Controls Gallery that looks a lot like the Widgets Gallery. Peruse the Gallery, and when you find a control you want, click it. A pop-up menu appears, asking if you want to add it to the Control Center or menu bar. When you pick Control Center, it is added to an available spot.
Some controls have additional options for the menu bar. For example, Now Playing can be added to Control Center or the menu bar with options to Always Show, Show When Active, or Never Show.
The Controls Gallery offers only Apple controls. There isn’t an option to add controls from third-party developers or apps. Hopefully, that will change in a future update.
Rearrange controls in Control Center
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To move the location of a control, click and drag it to the desired location. It’s that simple.
To dive a little deeper, let’s go over how the layout works. Control Center is made up of 32 spots in a rectangular grid. The controls occupy the spots in the grid, and how many spots the controls occupy depends on its design. Some controls take up only one spot, while others are as large as four spots, either as a square or horizontally.
When arranging your controls, you can fit them together like a puzzle, but you are free to leave spots open if you’d like. You can rearrange them whenever you want.
Author: Roman Loyola, Senior Editor, Macworld
Roman is a Macworld Senior Editor with over 30 years of experience covering the tech industry, focusing on the Mac and other products in the Apple ecosystem. He is also the host of the Macworld Podcast. His career started at MacUser, where he received Apple certification as a repair technician (when Apple did that kind of thing). He's also worked for MacAddict, MacLife, and TechTV.