Realization of the Evening:

[grumpy_sysadmin]

Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)'s Spaces is conscious of multiple monitors. To the extent that if you hit its "preview all desktops" button with more than one monitor, it shows you the content of all of those monitors for all desktops.

Until I noticed this, I figured Apple was just playing catchup to Microsoft's deskman.exe XP powertoy (possibly by

Comments

[ultranurd]

I disabled Spaces after I ran into a bug where some windows turned invisible (I think because I was command-tabbing across spaces? Not sure what happened.). I think I'll wait for 10.5.1 to give it another spin.

[grumpy_sysadmin]

Really?

I definitely have not encountered that bug, and I definitely put up with Virtue's arbitrary raising of the third-tier application when you closed the first-tier's window, then clicked on the second-tier's window (think about how much that sucks for a second), so I'm not so sure that would even actually sour me.

I simply cannot work without virtual desktops. Before I realized that XP Powertoys existed, I was doing this in very ugly ways with X11 on Windows at work (of which let's please never speak again). Somewhere between 4 and 16 terminals is enough for me to look at at a time to complete a given Task, but it really never happens (at work or at home) that I'm working on only one Task at a time.

[grumpy_sysadmin]

I do mean somewhere between 4 and sixteen terminals without visual overlap, of course.

[ultranurd]

Wasn't even going to mention screen or tabbed windows.

Ever since 10.3, I found Expose really works for me, to the point that I try and use hot corners even on machines where it's not available. It must be some spatial thing.