The Stacking Surprise
macOS Mojave introduced a highly touted feature called “Desktop Stacks.” When enabled, macOS automatically gathers all the messy, scattered files on your desktop and groups them into neat little piles, or “stacks,” based on specific criteria (most commonly by file kind: Images, Documents, PDFs, etc.). If you click a stack, it expands to show the contents; click again, and it neatly collapses. While visually clean, it can be infuriating if you rely on spatial organization. If you deliberately put a specific PDF in the top left corner because it’s urgent, Stacks will instantly grab it and hide it inside a generic “PDF Documents” pile on the right side of the screen.
Unstacking Your Desktop
To regain manual control over your workspace and stop macOS from automatically organizing your files into Stacks, you must disable the feature via the desktop context menu.
Ensure you are looking at your macOS desktop and that Finder is the active application. Right-click (or Control-click) anywhere on the empty desktop wallpaper. In the context menu that appears, you will likely see an option near the top labeled Use Stacks, and it will have a checkmark next to it indicating it is currently active. Click on Use Stacks. The checkmark will disappear, and the feature will instantly deactivate. Your desktop stacks will explode back into individual files, scattering exactly where they were originally placed before the feature was turned on. You can now freely arrange your icons without the operating system interfering.