can spaces be reset?

Question

can spaces be reset?

greetings,

I've been using spaces for a long time on both my desktop and MBPro... as many of us have posted already, i think spaces needs a bit of work. but i really need multiple workspaces... so i put up with the rough edges of the program design and unexpected behavior and bugs...

does anyone know if there is a way to reset spaces? i'm hoping that might fix a problem my spaces is having for a while now...

my spaces gets confused about where a window or program is... for example, i may have safari windows open in 2 spaces... when spaces was working correctly, if i selected from the "window" menu, a window that was in another workspace, spaces would transfer the display to the other workspace and bring the window to the foreground... or if i selected a program in the dock that is running in another workspace, spaces would transfer me to that workspace. if a program had 2 windows open in 2 different workspaces of the 4 workspaces i use, if i clicked on the program in the dock several times, spaces would cycle between each workspace that had the program running, but not the workspaces that didn't have a window with that program running... although i think spaces lacks some useful features available in other virtual workspace software, this one feature was a big improvement and very helpful...

unfortunately, this feature stopped working correctly over time. first spaces stopped working correctly on my G5. then it eventually stopped working correctly on my MBPro... spaces gets totally confused about where an open window is... if i select the program in the dock or the window from the "window" menu in a program like safari, spaces may or may not transfer the display to another workspace... it may or may not find a window for that application, even if the window is in the current workspace... i'm not sure which OS version this started with, maybe 10.5.3 or afterward... it didn't start immediately with an OS change either... the problem is somewhat intermittent... restarting doesn't fix the problem. it can be totally hosed or it might not work for some windows but seem to work with others... the symptoms change...

anyway, on my MBPro, the hard drive was replaced and the OS was reinstalled. i restored my files from back up... i had hoped that would fix this, at least on my MBPro... but the problem returns intermittently, like before. so i'm guessing that this problem may have to do with a preference file...

i look at recent posts in the forum, and see that others have a variety of problems and bugs... i didn't see anything about resetting spaces... so i thought that might be an avenue to try...

i was on 10.5.5 until last night... haven't used 10.5.6 enough to know if there's any difference yet...

i'd appreciate any suggestions-
thanks-

MBookPro, PMac Dual G5, PBG4 1.5GHz, PBG4 500MHz, iPod 40Gig, Mac OS X (10.5.6)

Posted on Jan 14, 2009 1:39 PM

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Answer 1

Kappy

Level 10

362,007 points

Jan 14, 2009 1:57 PM in response to Jeffery Nunes

There's no such thing as a "reset" for Spaces. You can open the Spaces preferences, remove all your added programs, etc. from each space (set them to none,) then uncheck the box to disable Spaces.

If you are having problems consider that they may be due to problems with your OS X installation. Perhaps reinstalling OS X might fix them.

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Answer 2

Jan 14, 2009 2:30 PM in response to Kappy

i did reinstall my OS when my hard disk was replaced a couple months ago. but since the problem did not go away, i occurred to me that it may be cause by a preference file, since that was the only thing that persisted across the OS reinstall... there must be a preference file in some library somewhere that stores all the setting one chooses in spaces... i do periodic maintenance, like repair permissions and the like... that never changed the behavior...

this problem doesn't limit itself to programs in the spaces prefs... i only assign ical and mail to a workspace... all other programs should open where ever i use them, although they've never in fact done that reliably... for example, control K in the finder for "connect to server" always throws me to some other workspace... sometimes it appears in the workspace from the previous usage, sometime not... it may continue reopening in a particular workspace for a long time, regardless of how many times i drag it to another workspace... then magically, it will open in one of the other workspaces for a long time, even if i didn't drag it there... other times, space has no idea which workspace the "connect to server" dialog box is in and the finder opens it behind other windows... so the only way i can find it is to use expose, in each space until i can find it... since this is intermittent, it can magically start working differently at different times...

i sure hope apple fixes spaces eventually, even if it isn't until 10.6, because this is quite maddening sometimes...

thanks for your suggestion-

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Answer 3

V.K.

Level 9

56,192 points

Jan 14, 2009 2:41 PM in response to Jeffery Nunes

you can reset dock preferences which will reset spaces and dock to the defaults. that's the best you can do. Delete the file homedirectory/library/preferences/com.apple.dock.plist and run the following command in terminal

killall Dock

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Answer 4

Jan 14, 2009 4:37 PM in response to V.K.

thanks,

i'll give that a try...

killall dock should have the same effect as rebooting, unless i misunderstand what killall is..
just checked the man page for killall... funny, i would have thought that they could just add another option to "kill" to be able to use the process name instead of PID... but i suppose they want to kept "kill" working the same as standard unix...

thanks for the info...

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Answer 5

Jan 15, 2009 2:43 PM in response to V.K.

that did clear some of the problems with spaces for the moment... some of the original quirks are still there, but it seems to be working now... hopefully, it won't act up again for a while...

thanks-

ps: it is quite remarkable how helpful apple's forums are... most of the time, there are helpful replies pretty quickly to my posts or questions... i try to answer some questions for others while i'm here too... on other forums at other sites, there often are no replies or nobody knows anything about how it work... it is quite remarkable how different the apple galaxy is from much of rest the computing universe... i really like being part of this community... (-;

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