Filed under: Tips and tricks, Mac 101
Mac 101: Spaces for your screen and brain
To activate Spaces, go to System Preferences > Exposé and Spaces > Spaces. From there you can enable from 2-16 "spaces" (virtual screens) and you can fine-tune application behaviors. For example, I have Skitch set to appear in Every Space, which simply means it'll appear in whatever space I happen to be working in when I open Skitch. Normally switching to an application will take you back to the space you left it in (you can turn this off in the preferences).
The really awesome thing about Spaces: it's like Exposé on steroids. If you're used to hitting a key and seeing all open windows, now you'll be able to hit a key and see all windows in all the Spaces you have open -- thus expanding your screen real estate considerably. Plus, you can use the two together. Hit a key to see all Spaces, then hit your Exposé key to see all the windows in every Space. You can also easily drag windows to another space either in the zoomed out view or just by pulling a window to the edge of the screen (depending on which space you wish to travel to). It's hard to explain, so watch the video to see what I mean.
Note that there are some apps (Microsoft Word 2008 in particular) that don't play well with Spaces, so your mileage may vary.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
Chris Liphart said 7:28PM on 3-27-2009
I love Spaces. I made my F5 key on my MacBook activate Spaces, as well as the side squeeze on my Mighty Mouse. Makes using Spaces WAY more effective.
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kmcgrady90 said 7:41PM on 3-27-2009
I use the bottom left corner to activate space and the bottom right to activate expose. Then I can open spaces and then expose to see all my windows in all my space :D
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robogobo said 8:40PM on 3-27-2009
as opposed to just activating expose to see all your windows. I guess you were making a joke?
kmcgrady90 said 8:43PM on 3-27-2009
I meant that you could see all your windows in all your spaces. Open spaces then expose so you can see all windows in all spaces. You know what I mean now?
robogobo said 5:38AM on 3-28-2009
yeah I see but I still don't understand why spaces helps that process. I know what you mean though. I remember doing that when I was messing around with it, but practically it's useless, especially on a smaller monitor.
Kevlar said 4:24AM on 3-29-2009
I do something similar, although Spaces is the top-right corner of the screen.
Spaces basically let me organize my apps, so I have a very un-cluttered screen, and know exactly where to find windows.
It has also done wonders for my workflow, as I can drag a file in to the top-right, and hover over a target space, then drop it into another application. It's funny, 'cause my boss gets really disoriented when he tries to watch me work, and he can't keep up with where I am or what I'm doing. :P.
sdfjoihoih ih said 3:35PM on 3-29-2009
it's better for small screens, smarty pants.
if i have dreamweaver, photoshop, firefox, and itunes open on my 13" macbook.. dreamweaver and photoshop get their own spaces, and firefox and itunes share one, so thats 3 different spaces, 1 is dreamweaver 2 is photoshop 3 is all my other stuff not really related to work
instead of trying to cram all these programs on one space, how is this not a good idea?
a ham sandwich said 8:02PM on 3-27-2009
funny you should mention office for mac not playing well with spaces. ive found the problem really annoying. to be honest, i find office for mac in general to be rather pathetic when compared to its windows counterpart. if i can, i reboot into windows to use office for mission-critical tasks.
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Aelver said 8:20PM on 3-27-2009
I like spaces, but iTunes drives me nuts when I flick between it and another screen ... it keeps flicking back to the itunes screen :(
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Allan L. said 9:03PM on 3-27-2009
Try activating iTunes for "all spaces".
moni said 2:40AM on 3-28-2009
I dont really like space.
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jjs1138 said 3:12AM on 3-28-2009
but... it's the the final frontier.
robogobo said 8:38PM on 3-27-2009
no no no. Ok, maybe spaces works for some people, but it definitely does NOT increase your screen real estate. It does give you more room for clutter, however. If you're someone who loves to have everything on your desktop (a big no-no), and you've run out of room, then spaces is for you, so you'll have 4 times as much trouble finding everything. Expose on the other hand, still shows you all your open windows. Why anyone needs those windows to exist in 4 separate sub-windows is beyond me. Needless to say, I disabled spaces after a few days of trying to see what the point was. Oh yeah, and many apps don't play nice with it. Just one of the many useless Leopard eye candy features.
Oh, but if it works for you, super.
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Victor Agreda, Jr. said 10:07PM on 3-27-2009
Let's see... one 15" diagonal screen vs. the FOUR 15" diagonal screens I now have with Spaces... Yep, 4 > 1, so I think it is actually increasing the "space" on my machine.
I use one screen for iTunes, Mail and Tweetdeck. Another for Twhirl and Stickies. Yet another for Firefox, Adium and Safari. The fourth I like to keep open or open NetNewsWire... and when I attach my 2nd monitor I get 8 screens, basically.
So it works for me. You're confusing the desktop with open application windows. Spaces doesn't give you more desktop space, only more places to put active windows (including Finder, but the desktop as you normally see it doesn't change with Spaces).
fjk said 2:35AM on 3-28-2009
As skeptical as I am about many OSX "features" spaces is most definitely not "useless Leopard eye candy." Maybe you need to learn to use it, but for many users that juggle e-mail, work, chat, multimedia, etc., its very useful in organizing your applications and windows. You can assign all your work and productivity apps to one space, keep your chats in another, internet browsing in another.
Sure, you can constantly minimize and open all your different windows, or you can even CLUTTER them all into one window and use expose to sort between 20 windows, but spaces is a solid solution to organization and productivity.
Don't make bold statements just because you didn't figure out how to use it.
PK said 3:17AM on 3-28-2009
At first I had no idea what to use Spaces for and never used it. But I found I needed an easy way to switch back and forth with my VMWare XP machine (Unity didn't fit my needs well). I found someone else's idea online and used it: dedicate VMWare to one of your spaces, then run the machine in fullscreen on that space. That way, whenever the machine is running, I can hit + and immediately be in fullscreen XP. Whenever
I'm done mucking around in Windows (which I always hope isn't long), I can hit + and be thrown back into the warm and safe arms of fullscreen OS X. It works perfectly, and has shown me that Spaces can fit my needs pretty well.
PK said 3:22AM on 3-28-2009
Sorry about that - my comment above ommitted the words "Control" and "arrow" from both sides of the "+" signs. That's what I get for surrounding those words with characters that made them look like HTML tags. Doh!
robogobo said 6:42AM on 3-28-2009
Victor, "screen real estate" remains the same 15" no matter if you have 20 spaces going. It's always 15" at a time, and you can never see more. It's "Expose on steroids" as many have put it. All it does is increase your desktop real estate, which only allows more and more clutter, because like a real desk, you can only reach to the end of your arms, and imagine only being able to see an arms-reach worth of that huge desk at a time.
My criticism of Spaces from the very beginning (when I learned exactly how to use it, thank you very much) was that it is a poor implementation of a Windows feature that has several better functional options in OS X. Expose gives you everything Spaces does. The application switcher is better at bringing forward all windows in an app. So why move to a "browsing Space" when you can just bring forward all Safari windows? it doesn't make sense. Everything Spaces does has a more efficient alternative.
But some people enjoy the more complicated method. So be it.
JW said 10:14AM on 3-28-2009
For me it's faster to # > or whatever then # < then to # tab tab tab H to hide it then # tab tab tab again to bring it forward.
Matt said 11:47AM on 3-28-2009
I think you're confusing what spaces does. All it does is manage windows.
Personally, I mainly use spaces when I'm writing a paper. I use one space for research websites, one space for the paper itself, and another space for iTunes/games. I find it incredibly useful because it significantly cuts down clutter and makes things much easier to get to.