How to assign apps to Spaces in MacOS Leopard

January 23, 2009 by Sukrit Dhandhania

One of the big features that came with OS X 10.5 (Leopard) is Spaces. Spaces is a tool that allows you to create multiple virtual workspaces. It’s like having multiple screens for your applications to run and you can switch easily between these screens to access different applications. This way all your application windows don’t have to be crammed into one screen. It’s quite useful once you get the hang of it. Let’s look at how you can setup Leopard so that an application is associated with a particular screen. That way whenever you launch that application it will automatically launch in that screen.

On my system I have setup four screens in Spaces. Spaces comes bundled with MacOS Leopard, so there is no installation required for it. To setup Spaces hop over to the System Preferences tool and click on the Exposé and Spaces button. Then select the Spaces tab at the top of the window. You should see something like this:

There are some things that you can setup here. You can setup the number of Spaces you want. As you can see in the screenshot above I have setup four Spaces for my system. Feel free to add more if you think you’ll need them. Once you are done with that let’s setup Spaces like we want it. I have setup my machine so that the Safari web browser opens in Space #1, Mail and the Adium chat client open in Space #2, and iTunes to opens in Space #4.

Click on the “+” (plus) button in the middle of the Spaces configuration window. You will get a drop down menu with a few applications as options. If the application you want to associate with a Space is not in the list click on the Other option. A finder window will then pop up. Go to where the application you want is installed, which is most likely in the Applications folder, select it and click Add.

The application you selected should now be added to the list of applications in Spaces. All you need to do is to click on the right hand section of the line on which this application is listed. A drop down menu will come up showing you a list of the Spaces available. Pick the one you want by clicking on it. That’s it.

Now whenever you launch the application you just setup it will open directly in the Space you set it up with. Add more applications. Remember that you can always change this, and you can also drag the application window to another Space after it is launched. This setup only ensures that when the application launches it does so in its assigned Space.

Your final configuration would look something like this: