Leopard Spaces

I have used some form of multiple desktop manager since the days of Mac OS9, the ability to separate my tasks onto different ’screens’ helps me to focus on what I’m currently working on without having to hide or minimise windows. On OS X up to Tiger I was using Desktop Manager to organise my windows.

Recently I have updated my laptop to Leopard, as it has Spaces built in I thought I’d use that, I’m not sure Desktop Manager even runs under Leopard. After a matter of minutes using it I realised Spaces is fundamentally broken. It groups windows of apps together rather than letting you decide which windows you would like on a specific space. For example I keep my personal Gmail account open in Firefox and my work Email open in Safari, I like to group these in the same space along with Adium and Skype. This is my communication screen. Now if I go to a second screen and want to open another Firefox window Spaces snaps me back to my communication screen. I then have to move the new window to the second space.

Thankfully I found this hints at MacOSXHints to disable the annoying snapping.

Open a terminal window and type:
defaults write com.apple.Dock workspaces-auto-swoosh -bool NO

Then restart the dock by typing:
killall Dock

To reset back to the default behaviour type:
defaults write com.apple.Dock workspaces-auto-swoosh -bool YES