Overall, I like the new Apple MacOS 10.5 aka Leopard. I used various virtual desktop solutions with older versions, but the new Spaces provides everything I need – almost. On a typical workday, I have various terminal windows opened – but not on one workspace! Spaces changes the screen to one that has a terminal currently running, which is a stupid behavior. There is also no way to change this. But a workaround…

If you have a terminal on space one and you’re on space three, clicking the terminal icon moves you to terminal one. What I would like to have is a new terminal on space three. You can do this with the following (trivial) applescript:


tell application "Terminal"
do script ""
end tell


So, basically the Terminal is asked to execute an empty script – which results in a new window without changing the current desktop.

Either you use the script editor to build your own applescript implementation, or you download a precompiled version below. I dropped the script into the dock for easy access. Now I have only two remaining questions:

1. How can I change the icon of the applescript?
2. How can I assign a keyboard shortcut to it?

Hopefully, Spaces allows you to deactivate the switching behavior in future revisions.

• openterminal applescript download

The leopard pic was released under a CC-Attribution-No Derivative Works license by Matt McGee.