6 ms·

Redesigning OSX Spaces: 45˚ Is All It Takes

108 points by kinetik 16y ago

rosstafarian 16y ago
to all the people worried about apple dropping spaces: Mission Control. Mac command central. Mission Control is a powerful and handy new feature that provides you with a comprehensive view of what’s running on your Mac. It gives you a bird’s-eye view of everything — including Exposé, Spaces, Dashboard, and full-screen apps— all in one place. With a simple swipe gesture, your desktop zooms out to Mission Control. There you can see your open windows grouped by app, thumbnails of your full-screen apps, Dashboard, and even other Spaces, arranged in a unified view. And you can get to anything you see on Mission Control with just one click. Making you the master of all you survey. from http://www.apple.com/macosx/lion/ http://www.apple.com/macosx/lion/ and i don't see how the above using the arrow keys in such a manner is superior to just using ctrl-space# for quickly switching between up to 9 spaces
chc 16y ago
This is an easy trap to fall into, thinking you've solved a problem when you've actually just specialized for one use case. 45° is all it takes only if you use Luka's four-space configuration (in much the same way that the current functionality is ideal for a two-space configuration). This "redesign" doesn't even define how other configs would work, much less improve on the status quo. Solutions are always easy when you leave scaling as an exercise for the reader. And all the solutions I see in the comments either bring back the major complaint about the existing functionality (unnatural navigational rules) or just scrap Luka's design and suggest something else.
- Stormbringer 16y ago
  What you say is a fair point, but the scheme he proposes would make the 2x2 situation so enormously much better that it is criminal that Apple don't implement it immediately. That, fixing the Expose/Spaces interaction, and fixing the key binding problem (when editing documents I got used to using the shortcut to move around between words, and spaces overloads some of the same shortcuts). Now that he's pointed out the problem with the vertical versus horizontal movement, I wonder whether a 1x4 set of spaces would work better for me than the 2x2 arrangement, given Apple's appalling default behaviours.
  - mwarkentin 16y ago
    I use a 1x3 arrangement, and it's pretty easy to keep track of where I am / which way to go when I need to switch.
aphyr 16y ago
Pfft. All blackbox users know mousewheel-on-desktop is the One True Context Switcher! Jokes aside, I can't help but feel that Spaces is somehow incompatible with the OS X application model. Because the desktop is application-centric as opposed to window-centric, it is very difficult to use an application for multiple tasks at once, which conflicts with the workspace-as-task model. Web browsers and terminals, for example, get spun up on every workspace for various short-lived tasks and destroyed shortly thereafter. But spaces (at least as far as my 3 hours of hacking got me) insists on switching to the last workspace containing a window of the starting application, instead of placing the new window where I am now.
- thought_alarm 16y ago
  There is an option in the Expose Preferences that determines whether or not to switch spaces when activating an application.
  - aphyr 16y ago
    dope! Was that introduced in Snow Leopard? My apologies.
zethraeus 16y ago
yeah. this isn't a solution. this is a special case with its clear issues disguised as an 'open question'. No dice.
siddhant 16y ago
I really wish Spaces would integrate with Cmd-Tab. Everytime I use Spaces, the only thing that bugs me is Cmd-Tab. If I'm on space 1, and I press Cmd-Tab, it shows all the open applications, which really doesn't make any sense (at least to me). If I'm on a particular space, I usually want to switch only between applications that are open in that particular space. Does anyone know of any alternative to this?
- keso 16y ago
  I think you could use Witch. http://manytricks.com/witch/ http://manytricks.com/witch/
piramida 16y ago
Genius. I used 4 spaces for some time and stopped using them without a conscious reason why - it just felt inconvenient switching between them. But now reading this it becomes clear why - the need to scroll through all spaces and no muscle memory of a needed move to get to specific space have developed over months of trying to use them. For more than 4 spaces, it could be a grid still, because you have to look at them anyway to actually remember where you need to switch to. For 4, this is a must-have change. So it will be the same grid as used for 9-spaces setup, just without the corner and center blocks.
burgerbrain 16y ago
Or just number them. All I have to do to change "tags" (loosely analogous, but actually far more powerful...) in my window manager is whack meta-#. The user is free to visualize this however they choose...
- JeremyBanks 16y ago
  They already are numbered; you can choose to use Control, Command or Alt + the number to switch.
  - burgerbrain 16y ago
    Huh. I guess I'm not really getting why the author thinks this "No matter which space I am in, the keyboard shortcut to move to any other space is always the same." is a big gain then. If he really likes arrow keys so much I'm sure he can just remap the shortcuts to get the effect he's describing.
glhaynes 16y ago
This is one of the reasons I've never liked (and never used) Spaces. I think this would be a better solution, even if it meant making the max number of spaces be four.
ugh 16y ago
I think Spaces is dead. I doesn’t really fit anywhere in the vision of the desktop Apple showed off in the Lion sneak peak, Apple might have decided to quietly drop it. The new fullscreen mode might take its place. Spaces wasn’t mentioned in the demo at all and it would be very inelegant to just tack it on top of the concept Apple has for the desktop. I will be surprised if it is still there when Lion arrives. Multitouch gestures to switch between spaces (instead of fullscreen apps as was demoed in the sneak peak) would be pretty cool but I’m not holding my breath. Apple does like to drop nerdy features few people use from time to time. The only thing that gives me pause is that they also seem quite happy to keep at least some of them around. The screen corners would be one example. (Then again, screen corners don’t change the whole desktop around.)
- podperson 16y ago
  I'm kind of hoping the Lion demo turns out to be a complete dead end. Most of the stuff in the demo seemed quite badly thought out. http://loewald.com/blog/?p=3440 http://loewald.com/blog/?p=3440 (careful watching of the demo revealed that pretty much nothing showed worked terribly well) I think it might be interesting to integrate ideas in spaces, expose, etc. by dynamically rescaling the UI when the user does stuff like resize or move a window. (After all, when you're messing with a window's dimensions you're generally not too concerned with every pixel in a given window.) In other words -- why does Expose need to be an explicit mode? When I resize or drag and drop -- rescale the UI dynamically to deal with the relationships between windows and apps. And this becomes even easier if some or most windows are full screen by default.
  - ugh 16y ago
    The guy who did the demo was visibly shaking, I think the errors he made were more owed to his own nervousness than flaws with the software. We will see, this is really you would have to use to see whether it works.
- aaronblohowiak 16y ago
  Spaces is vital to my current use of the 11" MacBook air: I wouldn't have purchased one if multiple desktops and application locking weren't available
sambeau 16y ago
I have 6 spaces. How would this solution work for that?
- vito 16y ago
  Maybe: x xx xx x Worst-case would be going from far left to far right, which would take 3 presses.
- amalcon 16y ago
  I've never actually used this before, but I've always envisioned arranging them in a cube, one on each face.
  - sambeau 16y ago
    The problem with a cube is that you will always end up with at least one upside-down screen.
iuguy 16y ago
As someone who uses multiple tagged desktops in Awesome on Arch Linux, but doesn't even use spaces on Mac, can anyone tell me why I should, and is it better or worse than Awesome's multiple desktops?
- vault_ 16y ago
  Well, nothing really compares to Awesome's tagging system (and I say that after only managing to survive a few days in Awesome, I need a bit more structure by default). I'm not really sure why, but Spaces just feels inferior to basically every multiple desktop implementation I've used on Linux. There's just not enough of a UI for it, and it's clunky to use. On Linux using multiple desktops is smooth and natural. On OS X, it just feels weird.
- koalaknife 16y ago
  I started using OSX after using XMonad for the better part of a year, and it doesn't even come close. Like vault_ stated, its simply to clunky. It takes almost a second to switch between workspaces, with a shiny and pointless animation. The shortcuts are hard to get right too, I still don't have a good one to send windows between workspaces (which I used to use extensively for keeping things organized and staying sane.) I assume XMonad is a similar experience to Awesome--I never tried to understand Awesome too much. Spaces cannot compare.
  - vault_ 16y ago
    Xmonad is nice, but Awesome's tags beat it IMO. You don't really have multiple desktops, you have multiple tags. Each window can have multiple tags and there can be multiple tags visible on the screen at any moment. So what you end up seeing is a union between all the windows with any of the tags that are set to be visible. Awesome is both really minimal and really extensible. By default you don't have anything, and you build it up to how you like it with lua and a couple of libraries that expose bindings to things like desktops and tags.
  - gfodor 16y ago
    My comment above repeated here just for you. Try: defaults write com.apple.dock workspaces-swoosh-animation-off -bool YES restart finder. Enable number key navigation. You're right, it's hard to move windows between. But, you can set defaults so that certain apps open in certain spaces. For me, this has been good enough.
mickdarling 16y ago
This idea breaks down pretty quickly when you add more spaces. I use 9 spaces on my macbook pro and have created multi-touch swipe motions to move me in any virtual direction I want. The simpler solution is to just make the spaces an infinitely wrapping plane like playing asteroids. For any one who thinks that 9 is too many spaces, back when I used lower resolution PC's I actually had a tool called JSpager that gave me 12-16 different 'spaces' and a miniview in the corner with views of the layouts in each space, and I could easily keep track of everything.
- cookiecaper 16y ago
  I have 15 tags in my awesomewm environment right now. Awesome also has independent tags per screen unlike most other multi-desktop WMs, so when I had two screens and nine tags on each I effectively had 18 desktops, and I also didn't usually have an issue keeping track of windows.
jjcm 16y ago
It's not necessarily an improvement. Sure, for navigation it makes things easier in the 4 workspace situation. However if you're using expose function in spaces, you'll have to have a 3x3 grid of tiles displayed like so: oxo xox oxo (where x is a "space", and o is just blank). The reduction in screen use might not be worth the boost in key-based navigation (especially since in the best case, this redesign only saves you a single keystroke [moving diagonally in the current scheme]). With this 'fix' in place, you'll have screen previews that are 33% smaller than they were originally, which may very well make things difficult to find in the expose overview.
- barmstrong 16y ago
  Not directly related to your point but.... I think it comes down to what percent of users have more than 4 spaces or wouldn't mind only using 4. The concept of making the typical use case better at the expense of completeness seems to be very much in line with Apple's UI decisions. I can't remember where I read this (I think it was in "The Inmates Are Running The Asylum" - a great UI design book). But he makes the point that as programmers we are trained to think about edge cases so we often bring this over to UI design where it's better to think of the typical case. Basically, when given two options in UI design: 1. satisfy 80% of users with a simple design 2. accomodate all users, but add a little complexity Choose 1
  - jokermatt999 16y ago
    I think this is also part of why a lot of typical techie types dislike Apple. Apple tends to go with #1, and often times techies are the edge cases who would be frustrated by it.
embwbam 16y ago
You could set this up today with something like keyboard maestro. http://www.keyboardmaestro.com/main/ http://www.keyboardmaestro.com/main/ - just remap the keys. You could create 9 spaces, only use top/left/down/right, and map the arrow stroke to the command to jump to a specific space
hokkos 16y ago
It it already like that but with the corners
sgentle 16y ago
That's crazy. I actually set my virtual desktops up exactly as he described in VirtuaWin, back in the day. The advantage he doesn't talk about directly is that if you're using a virtual window manager that doesn't have a notion of physical space (ie, it just has jump-to-desktop hotkeys, there's no "go up/down/left/right" hotkey), you can still configure it in a pseudo-physical layout using this trick by mapping each space to an arrow key. Obviously it doesn't map very well to n>4 spaces, but you could always have a Zelda-style "shadow world" with a different modifier key + up/down/left/right to get 8.
Hoff 16y ago
Set the lower right hot-corner to exposé and the lower left hot-corner to spaces, and navigating around spaces and windows becomes trivial. Hit both corners in sequence and you get all windows visible, and you can view or drag windows around between spaces as needed. Or hit the spaces hot-corner and the four-finger swipe, if you're running with a Unibody or a Magic Trackpad, for the same view.
- billmcneale 16y ago
  This only works if you use your mouse to move around Spaces. The current model is quite a bit broken if you use keyboard shortcuts, as correctly described in this article.
  - rosstafarian 16y ago
    erm whats wrong with using ctrl-space# to switch between spaces for the same effect he describes but with up to 9 spaces?
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- alexqgb 16y ago
  This is exactly what I do, only lower left triggers Spaces and upper right triggers Expose. The 45 degree mouse-swipes between them feel incredibly natural.
austintaylor 16y ago
I don't understand why switching spaces frequently is the interaction to optimize. If you are switching frequently, you are using it wrong. I've seen people running just two apps, and using Spaces to switch between them, and it's painful to watch. I stopped using Spaces after a while. I find Cmd+Tab to be quite good enough.
- cookiecaper 16y ago
  Most people are going to use more than two programs, first of all. Secondly, who cares if someone likes to use Spaces for two programs? I guess you're annoyed by the animation? Turn it off. I've never really liked the aspect of the Mac philosophy that essentially amounts to "my way or the highway".
joblessjunkie 16y ago
This is one of the first things I do on any new Mac: defaults write com.apple.dock workspaces-wrap-arrows -boolean NO This disables the spaces wrap-around behavior, simplifying the space to an easily navigated 2x2 grid. You can always get to the bottom-left space without already knowing where you are. So while it's not exposed to casual users, the author's request is already implemented in the OS.
fleitz 16y ago
He's redesigning the arrow keys to map to screens instead of mapping to movement from the current screen. The solution to a higher problem space (eg. more than 4 screens) are additional unique symbols. So if you want 8 screen use the number pad. etc. If you want 26 screens just map a screen to each letter. etc.
- avinashv 16y ago
  But you can go to 9 screens with the existing system: I press Control+[number] and it takes me to that screen--this is built-in today.
blahedo 16y ago
I've long used[0] a 3x3 layout and mapped the numeric keypad so that each number takes me to a desktop in that location. It was frustrating when Apple, for no apparent reason, removed the Fn+789uiojkl virtual numeric keypad for its laptops, but I found that KeyRemap4Macbook has a switch to make RightCmd+123qweasd do basically that, so I was able to adapt. [0] Before I did 3x3 I did 2x5. Why? Because the keyboards on the Sun Ultras that we used in grad school had this 2x5 bank of keys on the side of the keyboard that I wasn't otherwise using....
gfodor 16y ago
For those who don't know: defaults write com.apple.dock workspaces-swoosh-animation-off -bool YES restart finder. No more annoying animation. This + number key bindings make it so it is as fast as xmonad to switch desktops.
- focusaurus 16y ago
  Can you double check that? You have a space between -off and -bool, is that correct? I tried it, restarting finder with "killall -KILL Finder" but I still see the animation.
  - allenbrunson 16y ago
    I just tried it myself, and the defaults line is correct. However, he says you then have to kill Finder, which is wrong. the proper thing to type next is: killall Dock ... which finally causes the setting to take effect.

108 points by kinetik 16y ago

to all the people worried about apple dropping spaces: Mission Control. Mac command central. Mission Control is a powerful and handy new feature that provides you with a comprehensive view of what’s running on your Mac. It gives you a bird’s-eye view of everything — including Exposé, Spaces, Dashboard, and full-screen apps— all in one place. With a simple swipe gesture, your desktop zooms out to Mission Control. There you can see your open windows grouped by app, thumbnails of your full-screen apps, Dashboard, and even other Spaces, arranged in a unified view. And you can get to anything you see on Mission Control with just one click. Making you the master of all you survey. from http://www.apple.com/macosx/lion/ http://www.apple.com/macosx/lion/ and i don't see how the above using the arrow keys in such a manner is superior to just using ctrl-space# for quickly switching between up to 9 spaces

chc 16y ago

This is an easy trap to fall into, thinking you've solved a problem when you've actually just specialized for one use case. 45° is all it takes only if you use Luka's four-space configuration (in much the same way that the current functionality is ideal for a two-space configuration). This "redesign" doesn't even define how other configs would work, much less improve on the status quo. Solutions are always easy when you leave scaling as an exercise for the reader. And all the solutions I see in the comments either bring back the major complaint about the existing functionality (unnatural navigational rules) or just scrap Luka's design and suggest something else.

Stormbringer 16y ago
What you say is a fair point, but the scheme he proposes would make the 2x2 situation so enormously much better that it is criminal that Apple don't implement it immediately. That, fixing the Expose/Spaces interaction, and fixing the key binding problem (when editing documents I got used to using the shortcut to move around between words, and spaces overloads some of the same shortcuts). Now that he's pointed out the problem with the vertical versus horizontal movement, I wonder whether a 1x4 set of spaces would work better for me than the 2x2 arrangement, given Apple's appalling default behaviours.
- mwarkentin 16y ago
  I use a 1x3 arrangement, and it's pretty easy to keep track of where I am / which way to go when I need to switch.

aphyr 16y ago

Pfft. All blackbox users know mousewheel-on-desktop is the One True Context Switcher! Jokes aside, I can't help but feel that Spaces is somehow incompatible with the OS X application model. Because the desktop is application-centric as opposed to window-centric, it is very difficult to use an application for multiple tasks at once, which conflicts with the workspace-as-task model. Web browsers and terminals, for example, get spun up on every workspace for various short-lived tasks and destroyed shortly thereafter. But spaces (at least as far as my 3 hours of hacking got me) insists on switching to the last workspace containing a window of the starting application, instead of placing the new window where I am now.

thought_alarm 16y ago
There is an option in the Expose Preferences that determines whether or not to switch spaces when activating an application.
- aphyr 16y ago
  dope! Was that introduced in Snow Leopard? My apologies.

zethraeus 16y ago

yeah. this isn't a solution. this is a special case with its clear issues disguised as an 'open question'. No dice.

siddhant 16y ago

I really wish Spaces would integrate with Cmd-Tab. Everytime I use Spaces, the only thing that bugs me is Cmd-Tab. If I'm on space 1, and I press Cmd-Tab, it shows all the open applications, which really doesn't make any sense (at least to me). If I'm on a particular space, I usually want to switch only between applications that are open in that particular space. Does anyone know of any alternative to this?

keso 16y ago
I think you could use Witch. http://manytricks.com/witch/ http://manytricks.com/witch/

piramida 16y ago

Genius. I used 4 spaces for some time and stopped using them without a conscious reason why - it just felt inconvenient switching between them. But now reading this it becomes clear why - the need to scroll through all spaces and no muscle memory of a needed move to get to specific space have developed over months of trying to use them. For more than 4 spaces, it could be a grid still, because you have to look at them anyway to actually remember where you need to switch to. For 4, this is a must-have change. So it will be the same grid as used for 9-spaces setup, just without the corner and center blocks.

burgerbrain 16y ago

Or just number them. All I have to do to change "tags" (loosely analogous, but actually far more powerful...) in my window manager is whack meta-#. The user is free to visualize this however they choose...

JeremyBanks 16y ago
They already are numbered; you can choose to use Control, Command or Alt + the number to switch.
- burgerbrain 16y ago
  Huh. I guess I'm not really getting why the author thinks this "No matter which space I am in, the keyboard shortcut to move to any other space is always the same." is a big gain then. If he really likes arrow keys so much I'm sure he can just remap the shortcuts to get the effect he's describing.

glhaynes 16y ago

This is one of the reasons I've never liked (and never used) Spaces. I think this would be a better solution, even if it meant making the max number of spaces be four.

ugh 16y ago

I think Spaces is dead. I doesn’t really fit anywhere in the vision of the desktop Apple showed off in the Lion sneak peak, Apple might have decided to quietly drop it. The new fullscreen mode might take its place. Spaces wasn’t mentioned in the demo at all and it would be very inelegant to just tack it on top of the concept Apple has for the desktop. I will be surprised if it is still there when Lion arrives. Multitouch gestures to switch between spaces (instead of fullscreen apps as was demoed in the sneak peak) would be pretty cool but I’m not holding my breath. Apple does like to drop nerdy features few people use from time to time. The only thing that gives me pause is that they also seem quite happy to keep at least some of them around. The screen corners would be one example. (Then again, screen corners don’t change the whole desktop around.)

podperson 16y ago
I'm kind of hoping the Lion demo turns out to be a complete dead end. Most of the stuff in the demo seemed quite badly thought out. http://loewald.com/blog/?p=3440 http://loewald.com/blog/?p=3440 (careful watching of the demo revealed that pretty much nothing showed worked terribly well) I think it might be interesting to integrate ideas in spaces, expose, etc. by dynamically rescaling the UI when the user does stuff like resize or move a window. (After all, when you're messing with a window's dimensions you're generally not too concerned with every pixel in a given window.) In other words -- why does Expose need to be an explicit mode? When I resize or drag and drop -- rescale the UI dynamically to deal with the relationships between windows and apps. And this becomes even easier if some or most windows are full screen by default.
- ugh 16y ago
  The guy who did the demo was visibly shaking, I think the errors he made were more owed to his own nervousness than flaws with the software. We will see, this is really you would have to use to see whether it works.
aaronblohowiak 16y ago
Spaces is vital to my current use of the 11" MacBook air: I wouldn't have purchased one if multiple desktops and application locking weren't available

sambeau 16y ago

I have 6 spaces. How would this solution work for that?

vito 16y ago
Maybe: x xx xx x Worst-case would be going from far left to far right, which would take 3 presses.
amalcon 16y ago
I've never actually used this before, but I've always envisioned arranging them in a cube, one on each face.
- sambeau 16y ago
  The problem with a cube is that you will always end up with at least one upside-down screen.

iuguy 16y ago

As someone who uses multiple tagged desktops in Awesome on Arch Linux, but doesn't even use spaces on Mac, can anyone tell me why I should, and is it better or worse than Awesome's multiple desktops?

vault_ 16y ago
Well, nothing really compares to Awesome's tagging system (and I say that after only managing to survive a few days in Awesome, I need a bit more structure by default). I'm not really sure why, but Spaces just feels inferior to basically every multiple desktop implementation I've used on Linux. There's just not enough of a UI for it, and it's clunky to use. On Linux using multiple desktops is smooth and natural. On OS X, it just feels weird.
koalaknife 16y ago
I started using OSX after using XMonad for the better part of a year, and it doesn't even come close. Like vault_ stated, its simply to clunky. It takes almost a second to switch between workspaces, with a shiny and pointless animation. The shortcuts are hard to get right too, I still don't have a good one to send windows between workspaces (which I used to use extensively for keeping things organized and staying sane.) I assume XMonad is a similar experience to Awesome--I never tried to understand Awesome too much. Spaces cannot compare.
- vault_ 16y ago
  Xmonad is nice, but Awesome's tags beat it IMO. You don't really have multiple desktops, you have multiple tags. Each window can have multiple tags and there can be multiple tags visible on the screen at any moment. So what you end up seeing is a union between all the windows with any of the tags that are set to be visible. Awesome is both really minimal and really extensible. By default you don't have anything, and you build it up to how you like it with lua and a couple of libraries that expose bindings to things like desktops and tags.
- gfodor 16y ago
  My comment above repeated here just for you. Try: defaults write com.apple.dock workspaces-swoosh-animation-off -bool YES restart finder. Enable number key navigation. You're right, it's hard to move windows between. But, you can set defaults so that certain apps open in certain spaces. For me, this has been good enough.

mickdarling 16y ago

This idea breaks down pretty quickly when you add more spaces. I use 9 spaces on my macbook pro and have created multi-touch swipe motions to move me in any virtual direction I want. The simpler solution is to just make the spaces an infinitely wrapping plane like playing asteroids. For any one who thinks that 9 is too many spaces, back when I used lower resolution PC's I actually had a tool called JSpager that gave me 12-16 different 'spaces' and a miniview in the corner with views of the layouts in each space, and I could easily keep track of everything.

cookiecaper 16y ago
I have 15 tags in my awesomewm environment right now. Awesome also has independent tags per screen unlike most other multi-desktop WMs, so when I had two screens and nine tags on each I effectively had 18 desktops, and I also didn't usually have an issue keeping track of windows.

jjcm 16y ago

It's not necessarily an improvement. Sure, for navigation it makes things easier in the 4 workspace situation. However if you're using expose function in spaces, you'll have to have a 3x3 grid of tiles displayed like so: oxo xox oxo (where x is a "space", and o is just blank). The reduction in screen use might not be worth the boost in key-based navigation (especially since in the best case, this redesign only saves you a single keystroke [moving diagonally in the current scheme]). With this 'fix' in place, you'll have screen previews that are 33% smaller than they were originally, which may very well make things difficult to find in the expose overview.

barmstrong 16y ago
Not directly related to your point but.... I think it comes down to what percent of users have more than 4 spaces or wouldn't mind only using 4. The concept of making the typical use case better at the expense of completeness seems to be very much in line with Apple's UI decisions. I can't remember where I read this (I think it was in "The Inmates Are Running The Asylum" - a great UI design book). But he makes the point that as programmers we are trained to think about edge cases so we often bring this over to UI design where it's better to think of the typical case. Basically, when given two options in UI design: 1. satisfy 80% of users with a simple design 2. accomodate all users, but add a little complexity Choose 1
- jokermatt999 16y ago
  I think this is also part of why a lot of typical techie types dislike Apple. Apple tends to go with #1, and often times techies are the edge cases who would be frustrated by it.

embwbam 16y ago

You could set this up today with something like keyboard maestro. http://www.keyboardmaestro.com/main/ http://www.keyboardmaestro.com/main/ - just remap the keys. You could create 9 spaces, only use top/left/down/right, and map the arrow stroke to the command to jump to a specific space

hokkos 16y ago

It it already like that but with the corners

sgentle 16y ago

That's crazy. I actually set my virtual desktops up exactly as he described in VirtuaWin, back in the day. The advantage he doesn't talk about directly is that if you're using a virtual window manager that doesn't have a notion of physical space (ie, it just has jump-to-desktop hotkeys, there's no "go up/down/left/right" hotkey), you can still configure it in a pseudo-physical layout using this trick by mapping each space to an arrow key. Obviously it doesn't map very well to n>4 spaces, but you could always have a Zelda-style "shadow world" with a different modifier key + up/down/left/right to get 8.

Hoff 16y ago

Set the lower right hot-corner to exposé and the lower left hot-corner to spaces, and navigating around spaces and windows becomes trivial. Hit both corners in sequence and you get all windows visible, and you can view or drag windows around between spaces as needed. Or hit the spaces hot-corner and the four-finger swipe, if you're running with a Unibody or a Magic Trackpad, for the same view.

billmcneale 16y ago
This only works if you use your mouse to move around Spaces. The current model is quite a bit broken if you use keyboard shortcuts, as correctly described in this article.
- rosstafarian 16y ago
  erm whats wrong with using ctrl-space# to switch between spaces for the same effect he describes but with up to 9 spaces?
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
alexqgb 16y ago
This is exactly what I do, only lower left triggers Spaces and upper right triggers Expose. The 45 degree mouse-swipes between them feel incredibly natural.

austintaylor 16y ago

I don't understand why switching spaces frequently is the interaction to optimize. If you are switching frequently, you are using it wrong. I've seen people running just two apps, and using Spaces to switch between them, and it's painful to watch. I stopped using Spaces after a while. I find Cmd+Tab to be quite good enough.

cookiecaper 16y ago
Most people are going to use more than two programs, first of all. Secondly, who cares if someone likes to use Spaces for two programs? I guess you're annoyed by the animation? Turn it off. I've never really liked the aspect of the Mac philosophy that essentially amounts to "my way or the highway".

joblessjunkie 16y ago

This is one of the first things I do on any new Mac: defaults write com.apple.dock workspaces-wrap-arrows -boolean NO This disables the spaces wrap-around behavior, simplifying the space to an easily navigated 2x2 grid. You can always get to the bottom-left space without already knowing where you are. So while it's not exposed to casual users, the author's request is already implemented in the OS.

fleitz 16y ago

He's redesigning the arrow keys to map to screens instead of mapping to movement from the current screen. The solution to a higher problem space (eg. more than 4 screens) are additional unique symbols. So if you want 8 screen use the number pad. etc. If you want 26 screens just map a screen to each letter. etc.

avinashv 16y ago
But you can go to 9 screens with the existing system: I press Control+[number] and it takes me to that screen--this is built-in today.

blahedo 16y ago

I've long used[0] a 3x3 layout and mapped the numeric keypad so that each number takes me to a desktop in that location. It was frustrating when Apple, for no apparent reason, removed the Fn+789uiojkl virtual numeric keypad for its laptops, but I found that KeyRemap4Macbook has a switch to make RightCmd+123qweasd do basically that, so I was able to adapt. [0] Before I did 3x3 I did 2x5. Why? Because the keyboards on the Sun Ultras that we used in grad school had this 2x5 bank of keys on the side of the keyboard that I wasn't otherwise using....

gfodor 16y ago

For those who don't know: defaults write com.apple.dock workspaces-swoosh-animation-off -bool YES restart finder. No more annoying animation. This + number key bindings make it so it is as fast as xmonad to switch desktops.

focusaurus 16y ago
Can you double check that? You have a space between -off and -bool, is that correct? I tried it, restarting finder with "killall -KILL Finder" but I still see the animation.
- allenbrunson 16y ago
  I just tried it myself, and the defaults line is correct. However, he says you then have to kill Finder, which is wrong. the proper thing to type next is: killall Dock ... which finally causes the setting to take effect.