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Number off by one if Dashboard was enabled before Catalina

Open Flexperte opened this issue 4 years ago • 3 comments

Maybe it's a question, maybe it's an enhancement request. I've seen on some Macs I installed WhichSpace on, that "Space 1" according to Mission Control is shown as "2" by WhichSpace, and also the rest off by one. I suspect that this is because of the Dashboard being internally counted as Space No. 1.

Unfortunately starting with Catalina there is no way to configure Dashboard in the System Preferences any more, and I couldn't find a way to postumously deactivate Dashboard to make the Spaces count start at 1. I tried:

  • defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -bool true
  • defaults write com.apple.dashboard enabled-state -int 1
  • defaults write com.apple.dock dashboard-in-overlay -bool true
  • and deleting the com.apple.dashboard.plist altogether

but nothing helped so far.

? Is there a way to correct macOS' internal Spaces count to start at 1? ? If not: Could maybe WhichSpace as a workaround do what Mission Control does and correct the count shown?

This was done for fullscreen apps in #12, but not for the Dashboard, although that was mentioned there too by martin-braun.

Flexperte avatar Jan 29 '21 08:01 Flexperte

Ok, finally I could eliminate the "dashboard" Space by editing ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.spaces.plist with the defaults utility Some Notes:

  • For whatever reasons I had trouble to make the modification stick. Resorted to do it while not being logged in, from a different user account using su. Might not have been necessary.
  • In com.apple.spaces.plist I found two entries: one in the "Monitors" dict (uuid: "dashboard") and one in the "Space Properties" dict (name: "dashboard"). I didn't test removing only one of those.

Still for the average WhichSpace user this is disturbing enough to maybe do something about it.

  • either work around it by ignoring the "dashboard" space
  • and/or (if on Catalina or later) offer to fix it by removing the obsolete entries

Flexperte avatar Jan 29 '21 10:01 Flexperte

Running into the same issue. Just installed WhichSpace. Got 2 desktops (#1 and 2), but WhichSpaces shows values 2-3.

fabswt avatar Oct 28 '21 08:10 fabswt

defaults delete com.apple.spaces defaults delete com.apple.dashboard

Bellavene avatar Jan 09 '23 20:01 Bellavene