I just upgraded my MacBook Pro to 10.5, and I guess there will be a few Leopard specific postings the next couple of weeks. The first one is about Spaces, Apples multi-workspace solution for your Mac. Now, I can throw away Virtue Desktop and the rest of the bunch of applications I have used to get multiple-workspaces on my Macs for more than 5 years now. I changed my desktop environment from Unix (NetBSD) and X11 to OS X, and one of the first things I started searching for was a multi-workspace solution. On my NetBSD computer I had multiple workspaces when running X11 (and whatever windows manager I preferred at the given time), but also at console level (with or without X11 running). Switching between different virtual consoles and X11 workspaces was so common that I didn't know how live (well, work) without it. On my Mac I have used different commercial and free solutions, but some have been unstable, some have missed important features, and some have stopped working when upgrading HW (to Intel) or OS. Hopefully Spaces, a non-third-party hack, will match my needs. So far it is promising, but a few things doesn't work as I would prefer. I use a (work)space for a given task, not for a given application. The consequence is that I would like to have different windows from a given application (say Safari) open at different workspaces. If use Cmd-TAB to switch to Safari, then Spaces moves me to the workspace where my Safari application is running. I would prefer if I could be left in the same workspace (that doesn't have a open Safari window), then press Cmd-N, and get a new Safari window in this workspace. This is also true for other applications. The only application that works as I would prefer is Finder. But of course, below the surface a solution (a preference setting) exits. In a terminal type this command:
defaults write com.apple.Dock workspaces-auto-swoosh -bool NO
Then restart the Dock (killall Dock) and you have a happy Spaces user (me). Be aware that if you assign Safari (or other applications) to a given (work)space, then any new windows you create (Cmd-N) will end up at this assigned (work)space. [via]
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Last updated: February 15, 2008
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