Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Spaces in Lion

Using dual monitor

Hi,

For years (with Snow Leopard), I have been using two monitors at home and just one when I'm away. I use to run some applications on the secondary display (iTunes, ...) while some others on the primary. Applications remember where they were opened, so when I'm working with only one monitor there is NO WAY to "see" their windows.

With Snow Leopard, this wasn't an issue because hitting the Spaces/Exposé key, I had a COMPLETE view of ALL my opened applications (regardless where they were opened) on the MAIN screen, so whenever I need to "see" an application window running on the alternate display I could drag it back to the main screen.

Lion has changed that behaviour, and now it seems that when only one monitor is attached there is NO WAY to bring an application window back to the main screen because Mission Control only shows all the "spaces" on your screen, but no the spaces on the alternate (they are shown on the alternate/missing monitor).

Obviously this is very frustrating as I'm using dual screen at home but single screen anywhere else, so when I'm away I'm unable to run (to see) any application "assigned" to the alternate monitor.

Any ideas? Please advise.
 
Archbishop, I don't follow. When i'm not connected to the second display, all my windows move back to the main monitor, and Mission Control then displays all of them.
 
hayesk said:
Archbishop, I don't follow. When i'm not connected to the second display, all my windows move back to the main monitor, and Mission Control then displays all of them.
Click to expand...

I'm keeping/simulating the "presence" of the alternate monitor (even when when I'm away) to keep my desired application layout. You are right, unpluging the secondary monitor all the applications set back to the main screen but also they lose their position, ie, I have to move them back to the alternate when I'm back home.

So the question remain the same, using Lion, is there any way to see ALL the opened application windows (regardless in which monitor they are running) on the main screen?

TIA
 
Archbishop said:
I'm keeping/simulating the "presence" of the alternate monitor (even when when I'm away) to keep my desired application layout.
Click to expand...

how do you simulate the presence of the alternate monitor. I'd be interested in doing that.
 
baryon said:
I'm with you on this. I hate how Spaces or "Desktops" work in Lion. It's lame, it's pointless, and I loved the way you can use four arrows to navigate non-linearly between spaces in SL and Leopard. Apple should NOT change this, it's perfect. Dammit! I also love Overview mode, when you can just see all your spaces and drag windows from one to the other easily. And you can also do an Exposé in that view, so there is no need for Mission Control, as this allows you to see everything. Also, you can see everything the way it is, all at once, and not by clicking through your stupid Desktops icon by icon.
Click to expand...

I hate how Spaces work in Lion as well. So much so that one I have figured out how to remove Lion from my laptop, I will go back to using Snow Leopard.

How do I remove Lion anyway? I've heard it can be done, and I willl do it.

Jim
 
In 10.7.2, you can rearrange your desktops in Mission Control now (except desktop 1). You also can switch through your desktopts with ctrl + arrows but I think that was possible before already.
I'm still missing a rotation feature so I can swipe from my last desktop directly to my first one like it was possible in 10.6. And neither is it possible yet to arrange your desktops in a grid (e.g. 2x2).
Maybe there's an App for that? I really miss the rotation function. I always used three spaces in a row, able to reach any space from any space with just one swipe.
 
That is not the issue

Reordering desktops is not the issue. It is rearranging the apps from desktop to desktop if they are not in the main desktop in Mission Control.
Reordering desktops is a useless operation, and one that would screw things up actually. I remember that application X is on desktop Y.
 
Shortcut for "switch between spaces"

Lion has keyboard shortcuts for going "right" or "left", or to space/desktop n.

I want a *single* key-cmd that will *cycle* through the spaces, wrapping around when at the last space.

This was the "switch between spaces" shortcut in the Expose/Spaces Systems Preference panel in Snow Leopard.

Does anyone here know if there are AppleScript events, or bash commands for managing the spaces? For example, enquire what space number I'm currently in and go to the next space mod #spaces?

(God I hate AppleScript, but I'll learn enough to get Keyboard Maestro to let me cycle through my spaces if I need to! Is there a directory of apple events for Lion somewhere?)

-- Owen
 
Spaces productivity cut in half...any way to regain Snow Leopard gird style of spaces

Sorry to see that I am not the only one suffering with this change to Spaces under lion. Anyone yet found a fix? Original post to Apple:

Very Disappointed by the new interface with expose/spaces under Lion 10.7.2 to which I just upgraded. The new presentation of the multiple desktops is no where near as useful as it was under Snow Leopard. Under SL, was able to swipe hot corners to expose then spaces--th:eek:e resulting desktop images shown in the matrix showed all the apps on the desktop with their current names, and, if very tight, I could hover over the app images and spaces would tell me what it was. Very useful for managing the desktops. Also was much easier to transfer windows from one desktop to another as they were all visible and accessible without actually opening the individual desktops. Lion presentation, while "pretty" is much less functional and takes 8x the effort to utilize.
 
Archbishop said:
Any ideas? Please advise.
Click to expand...

When your away, click 'Detect Displays' in system preference -> displays and your laptop will recognize you no longer have a second monitor plugged in. All app windows that were on the secondary monitor will show up in the main display. Crisis averted.
 
Exposé and Spaces worked so well when they were separate. :eek: Mission Control just isn't as productive, and there isn't any benefit to the user that I can see. :confused: There are fewer ways to use it.

I don't mind if Apple makes massive changes. I can learn the new way of doing something, and just adapt to it. In fact, I usually like the "Apple" way of doing things. However, this change was unnecessary, and makes several of my most frequently used features of OS X less functional. Mission Control isn't necessary, and it was better the way it was before.

Things I really miss:

1. Ability to call up Spaces, then use a hot corner to call up Exposé while in Spaces. All Spaces are visible, and all the apps on each desktop are "Exposéd".

2. I call up Exposé to see which windows I have open, not which app I have open!!!! This is KILLING productivity. I know there's a feature named "App Exposé", but it isn't as useful.


I guess I could Google/Bing for ways to get rid of 10.7 on my 2011 MBA and install 10.6. :rolleyes:
 
Abstract said:
Exposé and Spaces worked so well when they were separate. :eek: Mission Control just isn't as productive, and there isn't any benefit to the user that I can see. :confused: There are fewer ways to use it.

I don't mind if Apple makes massive changes. I can learn the new way of doing something, and just adapt to it. In fact, I usually like the "Apple" way of doing things. However, this change was unnecessary, and makes several of my most frequently used features of OS X less functional. Mission Control isn't necessary, and it was better the way it was before.

Things I really miss:

1. Ability to call up Spaces, then use a hot corner to call up Exposé while in Spaces. All Spaces are visible, and all the apps on each desktop are "Exposéd".

2. I call up Exposé to see which windows I have open, not which app I have open!!!! This is KILLING productivity. I know there's a feature named "App Exposé", but it isn't as useful.


I guess I could Google/Bing for ways to get rid of 10.7 on my 2011 MBA and install 10.6. :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

I agree. I even put Expose and Spaces as extra buttons on my mouse so that I can see every window in every Space, without them overlaying each other, with just 2 mouse button presses.

I know some who didn't use SL's Spaces/Expose say that Mission Control "makes sense", but I have to wonder if they went back to SL if they would find that SL's Spaces/Expose can do everything Mission Control can do only better.
 
I can whine all day and about this garbage in Lion. I tried Lion in its official 10.7 back in July I think, went back to SL in a few days because of that garbage I refuse to call an upgrade.

What's that? Apple first makes a giant iPod and calls it iPad, now they figured heey whats better than a giant iPod? i know! A giant iPad! Let's make everyones Macs turn into giant iPads!
For ffs computers arent supposed to be tiny 10inch screens where you open everything fullscreen and swipe switch between them -_-

Spaces, the biggest desktop advancement and productivity of *nix based systems is now thrown out the door.

My Snow Leopard setup with actual Spaces is a 3 column by 2 rows. Why all these spaces? Oh using 2 monitors, and planning to upgrade to three.
Space 1 has my media apps and social/typical browsing.
Space 2 has my Mail and Calendar, making contact apps.
Space 3 has my GTD apps, Things/Evernote/etc.
Space 4, 5, 6 serve a specific project, usually one space would hold my school work, one space would hold freelance work, and one would hold my studying project.
And usually each space has a window of Chrome open on the secondary monitor.
OH not to mention the Space + Expose combo to see EVERY single window open, and if its too small, just tap Space bar and the highlighted window zooms in in actual size. What more can I ask for?

So you can imagine how many apps I have open at once. Right now I have 17 apps up and running across all spaces. Not to mention how many windows of each app(like Chrome, Finder, Transmit). I never have to worry about too many apps running and clouding my productivity and if I wanted to see everything, its a matter of two hot corners single handed-ly done with the mouse. I bet if I had the same amount of apps running on Lion I wouldn't be able to make heads or tails from my Mac.

Everything was perfect, life on a Mac made the most perfect sense, I would live with it for 10days uptime or something, all spaces had their designated jobs, I get into a space and the distractions of other things fade off, switching between projects and tasks was so easy I never wanted to use a Windows again.

I guess they figured with the resume and all people will close their apps and open them again everytime they needed them, WRONG.

it's time for a hardware upgrade and I'm pretty much debating my stay with Macs since the future looks like that while the future of Windows which is Windows 8 looking better than ever, with good multi-monitor control.

Please, if anyone finds any fixes to this annoying downgrade "Mission Control", post up! I still want to use my BBEdit, CSSEdit, and proper multi-window productivity.

Oh and how about the mess-up in gestures? My most used gesture of Back and Forth 3 finger swipe is broken to utter annoyance?! Did apps catch up yet? I tried to force-fully use Snow Leopards swipes with BetterTouchTool. Oh and gesture wise, SL+BetterTouchTool is > Lion any day.
 
Last edited:
I moved back to SL, mission control was just too much of a productivity hinderance. Spaces and Expose from 10.6 allow me to be FAR more productive. I have a dual monitor setup, with around 10-20 apps running at any given time. Maybe a kickstarter project might get a solution to this produced. If only we could mix Witch & ChangeSpace(from penny smalls), we'd be very close to an iLion solution. Hmm, maybe i should begin looking to KDE/Unity/gnome/mind/ubuntu if 10.8 is going to go moreso in the iOS direction. At least windows8 provides the classic file explorer in addition to the tiles interface.
 
Last edited:
All I want is for MC to show what Desktop my Safari Windows are in. How could this be so hard? I have 4-5 desktops each with their own category. I can't see what's in each damn desktop.

When I "show all windows" - put them in a grid per Desktop or at least Label them. They're not even in any semblance of order… I.e.' Desktop 1's windows, followed by 2. They're all strewn.

I'd be happy if a darned number appeared over the window 'icon' or in front of the URL or in lieu-of.
 
Not gone away

I think apple feels this has died down now and has gone away and we will all just upgrade in time. What it's done for me is taken my addiction for apple products away and opened my eyes to other products out there from phones, iPads to PC's. it's not only loosing spaces which could have been easily made an option to appease dedicated uses of it, it's the arrogant stance they have taken in believing they no best and we will come around. They started out looking after the detail with there products but have lost there way I feel. I've waited for each update to see if its been addressed and now I'm looking to upgrade my laptop, in the past it would have been the latest model not even bothering to look at others. But now I'll spec out everything and have a good look at windows 8.
 
I agree. Apple seems to be dropping the ball more lately.

I've got a 2007 iMac that's showing it's age, but I use Spaces extensively. So I'm not changing anytime soon.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back