Everyone has a love/hate relationship with Spaces. Most of the time it works flawlessly, but there are times when it makes you rip your mac apart (okay, never do that!). Now I don’t proclaim to bring you respite from all of the Spaces-woes, but here’s something that will make it a little better to work with. To understand the core functionality of Spaces, visit Apple’s Spaces page.
Make the Finder appear in all Spaces
While you can add applications to all Spaces, the Finder is nowhere to be found in the Applications folder. So you generally assign it to appear in Space 1, and then move the windows around later on. However, the Finder.app resides in your Macintosh HD » System » Library » CoreServices folder. Just drag the Finder app to your Spaces preferences window, and then assign it to appear in ‘All Spaces’.
Exploiting the Spaces view
We all know that the Spaces view can be invoked by pressing the F8 key, or any other hotkey set in your preferences. However, once in the Spaces view, if you press F9 (or your Exposé All-Windows key), all your windows in all Spaces will fly out. You can then drag and drop those windows among spaces as you will.
And to build upon this tip, if you press C while in Spaces view, all your windows will gather up in Space 1! Next, if you Cmd+drag any application window from one space to another, it will move all the windows from the current Space to the new Space.
Change the delay for dragging windows between spaces.
This will change the delay time to switch a space after you drag a window to the edge of a screen (you can do that by the way). The default is set to .75 seconds. Luckily, changing it involves a simple terminal command.
“defaults write com.apple.dock workspaces-edge-delay -float 0.5”
The last number (in this case 0.5) is the amount of delay in seconds. To revert the change, enter 0.75 as the value. After hitting return, restart the Dock by entering into the terminal:
“killall Dock”
There are of course a bunch of extenders for Spaces, all of which will be featured in a tasty article right here on SA, but for now we hope these little tips will help you organise your Spaces better.
