How to Switch Spaces in Arc (Ctrl+1 to Ctrl+9)

Ctrl with a number jumps straight to a Space by its position in the Space switcher — Ctrl+1 for the first, Ctrl+2 for the second, and so on. Cmd+Option with the left and right arrows steps between adjacent Spaces instead. Both work identically on macOS and Windows, where Cmd becomes Ctrl for the arrow version. **The modifier is the thing to get right, and it is genuinely confusing.** Space jumping is Ctrl+number on macOS, even though Cmd is the modifier for essentially every other command in Arc. Cmd+number is bound to something adjacent but different: selecting a pinned item within the current Space's sidebar. Two bindings, one modifier apart, both meaning 'the nth thing', operating at different levels of the hierarchy. If pressing a number key jumps to a pinned tab when you wanted a Space, you used Cmd where Ctrl was needed. That single confusion accounts for most Spaces navigation complaints. **What a Space actually is.** Each holds its own set of tabs, its own pinned items, and its own theme colour. They are not tab groups in the Chrome sense — a Space is closer to a separate browser profile that happens to share your logins, and the theme colour is doing real work by telling you at a glance which one you are in. Most people settle on a small number: work, a current project, personal. The design intends them to be durable containers rather than something you spin up and discard, which is why creating one has no keyboard shortcut at all. **Ordering matters more than it appears to.** Because the arrow shortcuts step to adjacent Spaces, the two you move between most often should sit next to each other — one keypress rather than two or three. Spaces can be reordered by dragging in the switcher, and doing so deliberately is a small optimisation that pays back daily for anyone who lives in two Spaces and visits a third occasionally. **There is no on-screen index, and the animation is the feedback.** The sidebar slides rather than cutting when you switch, and the direction of that slide is what confirms the move happened and which way it went. Nothing displays 'Space 3 of 5'. This works well once the theme colours are distinct and less well when several Spaces share a similar palette — which is a good argument for choosing genuinely different colours rather than tasteful variations on one. **Moving a tab between Spaces** has no default keyboard binding. Dragging it onto the target Space's icon in the switcher is the supported route, and the Command Bar offers a move command as an alternative. This is the same pattern as Space creation: Arc gives keys to the things you do constantly and leaves the occasional structural actions to the mouse. **Spaces are not tab groups, despite the surface resemblance.** A Chrome tab group is a labelled span within one tab strip; every group is visible at once and they compete for the same horizontal room. An Arc Space replaces the entire sidebar contents, including its pinned items, so only one Space's worth of anything is on screen at a time. That exclusivity is the feature — it is what lets a work Space contain nothing but work, with personal browsing genuinely absent rather than merely collapsed — and it is why Spaces scale to a handful of contexts where tab groups tend to collapse back into clutter.