Question

I am currently attempting to default an application to all desktops by modifying the plist associated with “Spaces” on 10.6 (and 10.7). On Snow Leopard, it’s possible to set the default desktop for an application by going to System Preferences > Expose and Spaces, and setting the application to appear on all spaces by default. This works as expected, and my application appears on all desktops.

However, I am looking for a pragmatic approach, and would like to be able to set this feature from within my application. I found the plist files associated with each OS:

OS X 10.7: ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.spaces.plist

and

OS X 10.6: ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.plist

Editing these files (in reference to application desktop defaults), then restarting the dock with killall Dock does not affect where my application shows up in Spaces.

I’ve also tried using defaults to set my default desktop with:

defaults write com.apple.dock workspaces-app-bindings -dict-add com.mybundle.thing  65544

This also failed to work, in that the application did not associate with the correct desktops (or all desktops, as the above command shows).

Both of these methods make the application show up in the System Preferences panel, along with the correct Space assignment. However, it just fails to work unless I assign it directly from the System Preferences.

Is there something else that I need to set, along with the plist, to get this working?

Answer 1

10.7 appears to store “all spaces” as the string AllSpaces.

For reference, it binds apps to the main desktop with an empty string, and to other spaces based on the space’s uuid value.