I know that those issues have been mentioned already on the forum in several posts. However, there are different issues at interplay and I wanted to make one comprehensive feature request with a proposal for a simple interface that could fix this for most people who feel this need.
First of all, this should be fixed by simply unchecking “displays have separate spaces” in mission control options. Unfortunately, this makes fullscreen support completely broken (thanks apple for making having multiple screens useless by greying them out - who implemented that??). This fix is actually worst than the problem it should resolve, unfortunately. 
The obvious solution would be to maintain separate spaces but link or join them when they’re moved - moving a space on one display makes the space move also on the other display.
What happens when there are two different grids? Like 3x2 on one screen and 4x1 on the other one? Boundaries (and circulation) wouldn’t work anymore.
My take is that if one desires the spaces to be linked, she would also want the same number of spaces on all displays. So, when this custom option (“link spaces on different displays”) is set, secondary displays always automatically have the same grid as the primary display.
In fact, it could work as follows:
- as a new display is added, it automatically gets the same grid as existing displays
- moving between spaces is linked (all spaces on all displays move at the same time with the same movement, and the animation is shown on all displays if active).
- opening the grid/expose opens the grid on every display, and clicking a space on one display moves all of them
- when a display is removed, all its spaces are DELETED and windows that were left there go back to the linked space on the primary display (let’s say that we had two screens, and a 2x2 grid. We had 4 spaces on monitor 1 and 4 on monitor 2, total 8 spaces: 1-1, 1-2, 1-3, 1-4, 2-1, 2-2, 2-3, 2-4. monitor 2 is suddenly detached. windows in 2-1 go to 1-1, those in 2-2 goes to 1-2, etc etc).
This would permit the user to select one grid once and for all and having it replicated on every display she adds. No surprises and everything would work in a predictable way, arguably more intuitive and predictable that Apple’s current implementation IMHO. With the added bonus that adding and removing a display right now would need to add and remove spaces before starting actual work, with this option everything would be already set.
The numbering of spaces could be as follows. I would probably try to hide real numbers and show the user the same number for every linked space (e.g. totalspaces2 would show number 3 for all the spaces 1-3, 2-3, 3-3 on three different displays that are actually (if a 3x3 grid is assumed) spaces 3, 12, 21 (always 3 modulo 9 on the total list of spaces). I don’t know if that is feasible - maybe there are better solutions and it’s not a big problem anyway I think, just an interface decision.
What do you think? Is the display removal operation I described possible?
Totalspaces 2 is a fantastic app already. Truth is, for me it has no replacement right now, I could not live without it. The above feature, together with the in-place fullscreen fix mentioned in another thread, would make it just perfect. Thanks to the developers for fixing Apple’s mess; Maverick spaces implementation is unusable to say the least. I would have downgraded back to 10.6, but that is really not a long term option… and totalspaces is really better than that old implementation! I really do hope you will continue providing this great app also in the future!
