Spaces: Your Free Quad-Display Mac

Turn on "Show Spaces in menu bar" to make a menu of your virtual screens appear in the menu bar.. In that case, you'd open the "To switch between Spaces" pop-up menu, press Option, and

5.4 Spaces: Your Free Quad-Display Mac

Exposé made a big splash when it debuted in Mac OS X 10.3 But Leopard offers another radical step forward in window management that you may even come to prefer It's called Spaces

This feature gives you two, four, six, eight, or even sixteen full-size monitors Ordinarily,

of course, attaching so many screens to a single computer would be a massively

expensive proposition, not to mention the number it would do on your living space and personal relationships

But the bonus monitors that Spaces gives you are virtual They exist only in the Mac's little head You can look at only one at a time; you switch using a keystroke, a menu, or the mouse Instead of shuffling through your windows using Exposé, you can now leave them all spread out over a much larger virtual desktop

Just because the Spaces screens are simulated doesn't mean they're not useful, though You can dedicate each one to a different program or kind of program Screen 1 might contain your email and chat windows, arranged just the way you like them Screen 2 can hold Photoshop, with an open document and the palettes carefully arrayed On Screen 3: your Web browser in full-screen mode

You can also have the same program running on multiple screens—but different

documents or projects open on each one

Now, virtual screens aren't a new idea—this sort of software has been available for the Mac and Windows for years But it's never before been a standard feature of an operating system, and rarely executed with such finesse

5.4.1 Turning on Spaces

To "install" your new monitors, start by choosing System Preferences Click the Exposé & Spaces icon, then click the Spaces tab You see something like Figure 5-7 The setup ritual goes like this:

• Turn Spaces on The "Enable Spaces" checkbox is the master on/off switch

• Add the menulet Turn on "Show Spaces in menu bar" to make a menu of your virtual screens appear in the menu bar It not only lets you switch screens, but the numeral on it also reminds you which screen you're on

Tip: Consider turning on this option, if only at first, as a safety net Otherwise, if

you don't remember the keystroke for switching screens, you might lose one of your programs on another screen and not be able to find it!

• Add rows or columns Click the + and – buttons to add rows or columns of virtual monitors There's a difference between rows and columns, by the way Not only will you eventually learn to sense where your various window setups live, but you can also move from one screen to another by bumping the mouse against the

corresponding edge of your current screen—and you'll need to know which edge

• Set up program auto-screen assignments Spaces starts to become truly useful only when you make it part of your routine You'll eventually memorize where

everything is: Web stuff, top left Email, top right Photoshop, lower left Finder with Applications folder open, lower right

For that reason, you can use the controls in the center of the System Preferences pane to specify onto which screen certain programs automatically go when they open Click the + button to view your Applications folder Double-click a

program's icon to make it appear in the list Now use the pop-up menu in the

Space column to indicate which space you want this program to live on, as shown

in Figure 5-7

Tip: You can also choose All Spaces, meaning that this program's windows are

available on every virtual screen That's handy if it's something you use constantly, like a stock ticker or your phone-book program

To make a program stop opening into a certain screen, click its name, and then click the – button

• Set up keyboard or mouse triggers Once you've got your majestic array of

Cineplex Displays assembled, you need a way to move among them

Spaces comes set up with the Control key as the "I'm switching screens" key For example, press Control- , to move up one screen, Control- to move one screen to the right, and so on Or, if you have tons of screens, you can jump to one

by number (as indicated in the map shown in Figure 5-7): Control-1, Control-4, Control-9, or whatever

Figure 5-7 Use the controls at the top to specify how many virtual screens you want—how many rows, how many columns, up to 16 in all Use the middle section to specify where you want particular programs to appear (that

is, on which screen) when they open Use the bottom controls to set up how

you want to move from one screen to another

You're welcome to change these keyboard assignments, however, especially if you're already using the Control key for other functions Use the two bottom

pop-up menus

For example, suppose you want to switch screens by pressing the Option key rather than Control In that case, you'd open the "To switch between Spaces"

pop-up menu, press Option, and choose " Arrow Keys." (In these pop-up menus, means the Option key, is the Shift key, and ^ means Control.)

Tip: The pop-up menu at the bottom of the window, "To activate Spaces," lets you

choose a keystroke that open up the master map of all your screens (See Figure 5-9.) For tips on choosing a keystroke, see Section 5.3.2.2

5.4.2 Using Spaces

Once you've got Spaces set up and turned on, the fun begins Start by moving to the virtual screen you want Here are some ways to do that:

• Choose a virtual screen's number from the Spaces menulet, shown in Figure 5-7

• Press Control-arrow key, or whatever keystroke you set up as described above Or hold down Control and keep tapping the arrow key to scroll through all your

screens

• Press Control-number key to jump to a screen without having to scroll

• Use the heads-up switcher (Section 4.3),or the Dock, to select a program; Spaces switches to the proper screen automatically

Tip: If a program's windows are scattered on different screens, you can click that

program's Dock icon repeatedly to jump from window to window (On the other hand, the window-switching keystroke -~ works only within a single screen It never takes you from one virtual screen to another.)

When you make a switch, you see a flash of animation as one screen flies away and another appears You also see the display shown in Figure 5-8 to help you orient yourself among your magnificent array of virtual monitors

Now that you're "on" the screen you want, open programs and arrange windows onto it as usual

Figure 5-8 This display appears momentarily when you switch screens The arrow shows you the screens you're moving to and from You can even move diagonally While pressing Control, press two arrow keys on your keyboard at once (like

and )

5.4.2.1 The big picture

Along with Spaces, Mac OS X 10.5 brings with it yet another window-controlling

function-key keystroke: the F8 key It opens up a gigantic miniature (if there is such a thing) of your entire Spaces universe (Figure 5-9)

Clicking the Spaces icon in the Dock brings up the same display

Note: As usual, you may run into trouble with this key if you're using Apple's aluminum,

super flat keyboard See the box on Section 5.3.1

Figure 5-9 Press F8, or click Spaces in your Dock, to open this live master view of all the windows on all the screens (The windows update in real time—if you're in a chat or playing a movie, for example.) You can actually drag individual windows from one of these "window panes" (actually virtual screens) to another In fact, you

can even use the Exposé keystrokes to make all the windows on all the screens

visible at once, for ease in moving them around the screens

So what can you do here?

• Get oriented Especially at first, it's easy to become disoriented among your

screens You could have sworn you opened your favorite Web site—where the heck is it? Pressing F8 gives you an instant readout of where all your windows are sitting at the moment

• Switch screens Click any "pane" of the big-picture view to jump to the screen

• Reorder the screens.Using any blank background spot as a handle, you can drag the actual panes of the big-picture view around to rearrange them If you decide that your email screen should really be at top left, drag it there

• Move windows around Here's the real power of the big-picture view As shown in Figure 5-9, you can actually drag windows from one screen to another You can use any part of the window as a handle, not just the title bar

Tip: If you press Shift as you drag, you move all windows that belong to the same

program simultaneously

Hit an Exposé keystroke.You can actually use the F9 and F10 Exposé keystrokes while you're in the F8 big-picture view

Yes, this gets kind of meta, but it's useful when you're trying to arrange your

windows and programs among your screens Once you're in the F8 big-picture view, for example, you can hit F9 to see all windows on all screens scurry apart,

so that nothing is covered up Then start dragging windows onto different screens

as necessary

Tip: Once the big-picture view is open, pressing the letter C key rounds up all of your

open windows, from all virtual screens, into the first space—a handy way to consolidate your world in times of disorientation Press C again to send them back where they started

5.4.2.2 Moving windows among screens

One way to move a particular window to a different screen is to drag it in big-picture view, as shown in Figure 5-9

But there are two other ways that don't require entering the F8 big-picture view:

• Drag a window (using its title bar as a handle) all the way to the edge of the

screen Stay there with the mouse button still down After about a second, you'll see the adjacent screen slide into view; you've just moved the window

• Click anywhere inside a window, and keep the mouse button down Now press your screen-switching keystroke (Control- , for example, or Control-3)

You've just moved the window to the designated screen

To be sure, these are power-user techniques that may not come naturally But the F8 big-picture view is always waiting should you become befuddled

Tip: What if you want to drag something from one screen (like a photo in iPhoto) into a

window that's on a different screen (like an outgoing email message)?Two ways; take your pick First, you can start dragging whatever it is—and then, in mid-drag, press F8 to open the big-picture view, and complete the drag directly onto the other Space (and even into the relevant window in that Space).Another approach: Start dragging With the

mouse still down, press -Tab to open the application switcher Continue the drag onto the icon of the receiving program, and still keep the mouse button down Mac OS X switches to the appropriate virtual screen automatically, and then returns you to what you were doing on the first screen