I’m new to unreal engine so I apologize if this is a dumb question but how on earth do I get the UE5 editor to run in fullscreen on mac?
Is there something I’m not doing right or is it simply not supported on mac?
Thank you!
Unfortunately, so far as I know it only supports old-school full-screen (i.e., “window fills the monitor”), not the relatively-newer “goes borderless full-screen and becomes a virtual desktop/Space you can switch over to” style. 
What a shame. You’d think that such an advanced piece of software would have basic mac support. I guess I made the wrong choice choosing to learn unreal using a 14 inch MacBook Pro
Honestly, I suspect it’s because it’s a cross-platform program, but yeah. It’s irritating.
That said, having patched the editor previously to support full-screen (and just… never gotten around to submitting said patch, then upgrading to 5.0), I have to unfortunately confess that I found even proper full-screen still leaves a 14-inch laptop feeling kind of cramped in terms of screen real-estate.
(Admittedly, my feel for ‘cramped’ may be skewed; I develop on a Windows desktop with a 32-inch 4K monitor… and when not at the desktop, a 14-inch M1 MacBook Pro. There is what you might call “a marked contrast” between the amount of screen real-estate available between the two.)
Honestly, I probably ought to just re-do the full-screen editor modification and actually remember to submit a pull request.
Can you please elaborate on what you mean by patching the editor to support full-screen and how did you manage to do that?
Again, I apologize if I’m asking very basic questions but I’m very new to all this and couldn’t find much help online
Unreal Engine is available in source form, though compiling the engine from source is enough of an annoyance that many people just use the binary versions you get through the launcher.
Back with UE 4.25, I got annoyed enough that I went into the source code and added support for full-screen mode on macOS to UnrealEd (the editor); the difference between the pulled-from-git version of the engine and the copy I was running on macOS is what’s referred to as a “patch”, because I’d saved it off as a file I could re-apply to each new version of the source when the engine got upgraded. Think of the file like a rubber patch you could apply when an inflatable boat starts leaking; you apply a patch to make the boat work the way you want (e.g., not sinking).
Hence, I patched the editor to add support for fullscreen mode.
Then I forgot about it, and now I’ve upgraded to a different laptop and use 5.0 on everything, so that patch file is long gone. (Plus, I doubt it would apply cleanly to 5.0 even if it wasn’t, since there’s been enough changes. I would likely need to start over on adding fullscreen support to UnrealEd for 5.0.)
If I were to do it again, it would make more sense to submit the change upstream to Epic, so that future versions of the editor had fullscreen support on macOS. (But I am not doing much development using the laptop at this particular moment, so my motivation to go make that change again is, admittedly, not large.)
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Do you have the source code? I make a pull request with the changes and send them to EPIC, so what line did you modify? I have the same problem.
I’m so late to the party but thought I’ll still chip in. The shortcut on macOS for immersive aka “full screen” mode within the unreal editor context is:
fn + cmd + f11 - just check your keyboard for those and press together
Best
I’ve noticed this behavior as well, and it’s mystifying tbh.
I double-checked (and toggled) the mission control binding in my preferences, and I know the F11 key physically works because I tested mission control during the toggling.
Anyway, I found a workaround - assign immersive mode to cmd + F8, hey presto it works?
I noticed that F11 works in PIE fwiw.
And if you want some more weirdness, play in a new viewport then hit F11. It’ll make the editor viewport fullscreen but not the viewport you just opened. Close the viewport and F11 won’t work to restore it anymore 