Working with Spaces.app v. Workspaces as a concept
First, I’m glad Apple began support of multiple workspaces with the release of Leopard last year. Workspaces was a feature that was truly lacking from an otherwise feature-rich user interface in OS X.
Having spent a long time with GNU/Linux — long enough for it to shape my formative computer development years in high school circa 94-98 — I’ve spent time with the various desktops that implemented workspaces. None — and I really mean none — have done workspaces better than wmii. While the window-manager-that-actually-manages-windows-for-you concept might be strange to some (indeed, not being able to resize windows freely is strange to most), the concept of workspaces via tagging is so amazingly powerful.
It’s how workspaces should be done.
I’ve begun looking into implementing this on OS X using a combination of AppleScript and QuickSilver, or something similar. Research so far isn’t promising. The numbers of workspaces in Spaces.app really does correspond to an underlying data structure, so tagging — especially tagging of windows that should appear on multiple, but not all spaces — will have to be stored seperately.
I wonder how much fighting I’m going to need to do, to implement this? Would anyone out there like to start an open project to collaborate on with me? Contact me, and let’s get the ball rolling.