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:
- How can I change the icon of the applescript?
- How can I assign a keyboard shortcut to it?
Hopefully, Spaces allows you to deactivate the switching behavior in future revisions.
The leopard pic was released under a CC-Attribution-No Derivative Works license by Matt McGee.
Nice trick :-)
To answer your first question:
You can change the icon of any file with Finder.
1. Select the file in Finder whose icon you want to use.
2. Press Command+I
3. Select the icon in the upper left of the Info window
4. Command+C to copy the icon
5. Select the file in Finder whose you want to change.
6. Command+V to paste the icon
Now, to your second question: Define a trigger in Quicksilver.