Spaces Becomes Usable

Posted on Friday, May 30th, 2008 at 7:06pm by Rob Wilkerson

I’ve had two big problems with Spaces up to and including 10.5.2:

1. When Command-Tab’ing to an application, Spaces would shift me to a different Space that already included a window of that application rather than allow me to open a new window in my current space. More »
2. When I had multiple windows of an application open in multiple desktops, Command-Tab’ing didn’t, by default, place the focus on the window of that app that was open in the same desktop I was already in. It didn’t do anything, really. It’s like that action confused the OS. More »

After a while, I was able to track down a fix – and by fix, I really mean glorified hack – for the first problem (which seems to have a real fix in 10.5.3 via a System Preference, by the way) and 10.5.3 seems to have addressed the second quite nicely.

Zang.

usability, mac, spaces 0 Comments

Rockin' the Keyboard: Cycle Through Application Windows in a Space

Posted on Friday, February 22nd, 2008 at 5:30pm by Rob Wilkerson

This may be old news to many, but today I happened on it by accident and, since it solves one of my major issues with Spaces – or at least with how I want to use Spaces, I thought it might help someone else.

The other day I wrote about how to make Spaces suck (just a little) less. I’ve been using the configuration described for 3 or 4 days now and so far it does, in fact, suck less. A nice win, but…

After a couple of days, a new gripe began to percolate. It turns out that Cmd+Tab‘ing is a lot less effective under this configuration. By way of an example, several of my Spaces include an open iTerm window and damn near all of my Spaces contain an open Firefox window. If I’m working in Eclipse in Space 2 and want to access my Firefox window in the same Space to test what I’ve just done, it’s no longer as easy as simply Cmd+Tab‘ing to get there. Actually, that’s not true. I can Cmd+Tab to the Firefox application, but only the application is activated – not a given window. Since there are Firefox windows opened in this desktop and in others, OS X has no way of knowing which one of those, if any, I really want to access. It would be nice if it would default to the one in the current Space (if one and only one exists), but…yeah, it doesn’t.

To mitigate my annoyance a bit, I started using Expose. Using the example above, I’d hit F9 and then click the Firefox window I wanted to work in. That works well enough, but it forces me to move my hand to the mouse and that slows me down (especially since I perform that particular action frequently). Today, though, I found (read: blindly stumbled onto) a better way. If I hit F9 (or F10, it seems) and then hit Tab, OS X will cycle through all of the applications on that desktop. Once the application I need is illuminated, I can hit Return and the most recently used window of that application assumes the focus. All windows of the selected application appear to assume a higher level of focus than those of other apps, but only the most recent actually becomes active, of course. It’s not quite as convenient as Cmd+Tab, maybe, but it’s not far from it. And anything that keeps my fingers on the keyboard is a good thing.

keyboard shortcuts, productivity, mac, spaces 0 Comments

Making Spaces Suck (Just a Little) Less

Posted on Wednesday, February 20th, 2008 at 6:11pm by Rob Wilkerson

I’m not a big fan of Spaces. It’s a good idea – no, actually it’s a great idea – that’s worked quite well in Linux-land for a very long time now. In OS X, though, it’s just not right. OS X’s Spaces seem to be carved around applications and that’s just not how people work. Okay, maybe I’m over-generalizing, but it’s certainly not how I work. Do a bit of reading and it appears it’s not the way a lot of others work, either.

Even so, I tried it their way. I did. I identified my most used applications and targeted a space for each. My spaces were roughly aligned by task, but a rough approximation was the best I could do in this model. I worked that way for a few months before giving up. My working environment was too fractured using this scheme and it threw me off my game.

I didn’t want to give up on Spaces entirely, so this is what I did to recover:

1. I removed all application-Space assignments.
2. I assigned a few, carefully selected applications to Every Space. Adium and Colloquy are two applications that I like to travel with me because I find myself in and out of them quite often and somewhat erratically since I’m not entirely in charge (others can contact me). They’re also not task-oriented for the most part.

Now I have task-centric Spaces for:

• Development (Eclipse, Firefox, Backpack – via Fluid, etc.)
• Browsing (Safari, Google Reader – via Fluid, etc.)
• Work (Remote Desktop)
• Windows (VMWare Fusion)

I also have two additional spaces that can be used on an as-needed basis for short-term, focused tasks.

For the most part, this works pretty well for me until I need to open multiple windows of something – usually Firefox or Safari. As a keyboard junkie, I’d like to bring the application into focus via Cmd+Tab and hit Cmd+N to open a new window. Unfortunately, the way Spaces is configured the Cmd+Tab process lands me back on the Space where there’s an existing window. I can still get where I want to go by creating my new window, then hitting F8 and dragging the new window where I want it, but I haven’t saved myself any effort and may have even added a bit. Ugh. QuickSilver also just brings an existing window of the selected application into focus.

My other option is to move my mouse down to the dock (which I hide and never, ever touch because I’ve become a slave to QuickSilver), right-click on the application that needs a new window and select the New Window option. Also ugly.

Yesterday, though, I read an article on Signal vs. Noise that might help. I’ve just finished installing the OS X hack it references. Here’s to less suckage.

annoyances, spaces, mac 0 Comments