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Questions tagged [spaces]

Spaces were renamed Desktops and brought together with Exposé and Dashboard as Mission Control with the release of Mac OSX 10.7 Lion.

A row of thumbnails across the top of Mission Control displays Dashboard, desktop spaces, and your open full-screen apps.

Previous versions of OSX referred to these workspaces as spaces but the terminology is being changed to desktops.

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How to prevent Mac from changing the order of Desktops/Spaces

You may have encountered a situation in which Mac changes the order of desktops based on some events like alerts on a program or a web page in browser. How could I disable this logical change? Note: I'm using El Capitan, but I had this problem since…
Reyraa
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How can I disable animation when switching desktops in Lion?

I would very much like to disable the sliding animation that occurs when switching desktops via ctrl+→/← or ctrl+[number] in Lion. This was previously accomplished in previous versions with this command: defaults write com.apple.dock…
Rob J
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How can I rename Desktops / Spaces in macOS?

I would like to give names to different Mission Control Spaces; currently a new Space gets the default name Desktop n where n is a number. Desktop 1 | Desktop 2 | Desktop 3 How can I give each space a custom meaningful name?
Dror
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Restricting Command+tab options to only apps that are in the current space

Edit: The original accepted answer is no longer valid for Mavericks. I am keeping it accepted for historical reasons, but all readers using Mavericks should use and up-vote this answer. By default, pressing ⌘+tab will display a list of all open…
ESultanik
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How to move a window to another space without using the mouse?

I use spaces for having multiple desktops, but often need to move a program from one space to another. I am aware of the various ways to do that with a mouse: Click-and-hold on the title bar of window and drag to edge F8 to show all Spaces and drag…
Winder
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How can I rename desktops in Mission Control?

The default new desktop space is named 'Desktop 1'. If you create a new one, it is named 'Desktop 2'. Is there a way to change those default names to something more meaningful? Additionally, it looks like you can't rearrange spaces either and the…
Peter Carrero
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Keyboard shortcuts for switching Spaces?

I have a laptop and a desktop both running 10.11.1; on the laptop I found a way to set up Spaces so that CTRL-1 would take me immediately to screen 1 and similarly for all the other screens. I rely on that convenience. But on my desktop I am still…
Jess H. Brewer
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When I switch to one of my workspaces with Chrome, it jumps to the other Chrome workspace

I make heavy use of workspaces, and tend to have a lot of workspaces, most of which only have one window. I pretty much always have two different workspaces that have a window of Google Chrome open. Ever since I updated from Yosemite to High Sierra,…
Hayden Schiff
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Why do full-screen applications change their order in Mission Control?

How are fullscreen apps organised? This is usually my workflow: Dashboard / Desktop / Safari / Pages I sometimes go to Pages and type some things and go back to Safari, and then I find that it becomes like this: Dashboard / Desktop / Pages /…
JFW
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Restore app windows to their original Spaces

When re-opening an app, all of its windows end up on the first Space, regardless of their original placement: Original layout: one app has two windows open, each in a separate Space +-----[ Space 1 ]-----+ +-----[ Space 2 ]-----+ | …
Jakub Roztocil
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Can we disable the drag window to top of screen Mission Control / Spaces feature in El Capitan?

Open Mission Control Use any of these methods to open Mission Control: .... In OS X El Capitan, drag a window to the top of the screen. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204100 I'm using a window snapping/resizing app and this feature above,…
Natetronn
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Is it possible to reorder spaces in Lion?

I would expect 'Mission Control' to allow me to drag spaces in a certain order (with the exception of the 'Dashboard' space), but this does not seem like an option. This would be especially useful when re-ordering full-screen apps: for example,…
Aron Rotteveel
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How can I make applications on OSX open new windows in the same space when opening a file from Finder?

OSX 10.8. Pretty simple. Right now when I open a file through Finder, if the filetype is set to be open by application Y, oftentimes OSX finds a space that has an open window of Y, and sends the file into that window in that space. What I want…
Philip
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OSX keeps switching to the first space

I use spaces with 10.9. I run a few applications in full screen mode. While focused on an application in full screen mode every minute or so I switched back to the first space. This happens with no input on my behalf. I suspected it was an…
Stewart
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How do I disable auto swoosh (automatic space switching) in MacOS Sierra?

I don't ever want to be switched between spaces except when I request it explicitly. In Yosemite, this could be solved by: disabling "Group windows by application" in Preferences -> Mission Control typing defaults write com.apple.Dock…
Jessica Knight
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