Comment by majormajor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by majormajor | Hacker News Reader

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Ever since 10.3, Expose was a fantastic way to manage lots of windows on a small screen (in my case at the time, a 12" Powerbook). Windows never offered anything similarly useful for me until Windows 7's "hover over the taskbar icon to see previews" feature. Then when Apple added Spaces on top of that, the Spaces+Expose combo was even better.

I don't understand the desired behavior in Lion at all, though. They took away all-windows Expose (I used to have one corner dedicated to all-windows and another to application-windows) and turned Spaces into this weird hybrid thing with a useless-to-me Full Screen mode... Fortunately, my personal laptop is still on Snow Leopard, and my work machine is used with a couple 24" monitors hanging off of it, so I haven't yet had to use the new way of doing things... But with the recent OS X trends I'm not sure my next laptop will be another Mac.

I use the multiple desktops/spaces on lion quite a bit on my MBP 13". Mainly due to screen size. I find the new expose/spaces combo to be pretty good.

I keep a lot of apps open at the same time, and I like to keep each one on it's own desktop with a couple minor exceptions.

I don't like the All-In-One version of xcode... not friendly with a small screen at all. Xcode 3, I would keep the doc window on it's own desktop, Interface Builder on it's own, etc... xcode 4 I lost that ability.

I use "fullscreen" mode occasionally; when I do it's usually a web browser or a terminal window. I'd use it more but even in fullscreen mode, I still want to be able to open a terminal window and keep it on top of the fullscreen app. Like for copying an example from the web.

It's too frustrating to do that if I am having to swipe back and forth between desktops...

You can get that behavior in iTerm2 by giving it a global hide/show hotkey and toggling non-Lion fullscreening on. The terminal appears everywhere whether you're in a fullscreen app or Mission Control.

on ML you can see all open windows (though grouped by app) by pressing F3 or swiping 4 fingers up, I thihk it was the same in Lion.

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