How to open more than one window of a Mac OS app

For the most part, Mac OS is great, and helps us be super productive. However, one thing that’s always annoyed me is how you can only open one instance, or one window, of certain apps.

While apps like Chrome, Safari, Word and the like will all let you open as many windows as you want, so you can work on multiple things at the same time, other applications don’t give you this functionality.

Even simple apps like Calculator only let you open one window – so you’re out of luck if you want to calculate a few different things at once.

Similarly, FileZilla, one of the most popular FTP clients, won’t let you open more than one window. That’s fine for the most part, thanks to its tabbed interface which allows you to connect to multiple FTP servers at the same time (or the same FTP server multiple time).

But sometimes it’s just neater to have two windows open, so you can have them next to each other, and have two different file queues, so you can keep track of progress of your transfers easily.

Thankfully, if you’re comfortable with Terminal, opening more than one instance of an app in Mac OS is a breeze. Just head to the Terminal and type:

open -n /Applications/Appname.app

This works for all (or at least the majority) of apps. Notice the -n flag – as described in the help file, what this does is “Open a new instance of the application even if one is already running.”.

Perfect.

How do you find out the name of the app you want to open? Just look in your applications folder, take the name that’s there, and add a .app to the end.

If there’s a space in the application name, you need to escape this with a backslash, so type a backslash before the space. So to open Google Chrome, for example, you’d type:

open -n /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app

How to open Calculator more than once in Mac OS

To open calculator multiple times on a Mac, open your terminal, then type or copy and paste the following:

open -n /Applications/Calculator.app

You can do this as many times as you want, to open as many calculators as you want.

How to open FileZilla more than once in Mac OS

To open FileZilla multiple times on a Mac, open your terminal, then type or copy and paste the following:

open -n /Applications/Filezilla.app

You can do this as many times as you want, to open as many FileZilla windows as you want.

But how do I open Terminal?

Press ⌘ + Space on your keyboard.

Or click the Search icon at the top-right of your screen to open Spotlight, type ‘terminal’, and hit enter.