Last week, TotalSpaces updated itself and apps began randomly switching between different desktops from the ones they are assigned to. Even when going to preferences, TotalSpaces didn’t seem to know what space was currently active, because switching apps from one space to another to try and force a correction did not do anything to help. I figured perhaps the fact that I was still running Yosemite might have been the problem, so I bit the bullet and upgraded to El Capitan because my TotalSpaces arrangement is absolutely central to my workflow and has been for well over the 5 years since Apple nerfed Spaces and introduced Mission Control.
After the El Capitan upgrade, I jumped through the hoop of disabling SIP to get TotalSpaces running again. At first, the situation seemed improved, (though I had to turn off transitions because TotalSpaces was sliding the wrong directions, including different slide directions simultaneously on my two monitors, which was very distracting and confusing). But just now, I had to spend about 10 minutes moving apps back to their correct desktops after TotalSpaces randomly became confused again. And then what happened? I switched to another app and suddenly they’re all on the wrong spaces again. What a waste of fucking time, and a huge interruption to my day.
I’m sorry about the language just now, but it’s incredibly frustrating to have things working fine and then become completely broken after an auto-update, forcing me to jump through a bunch of hoops just to end up in a still-broken state. I have been very grateful for many years for TotalSpaces’s existence. But right now it’s totally unusable, and there are no alternatives, throwing an enormous wrench into my productivity.
For the record, I was able to fix it temporarily by restarting TotalSpaces and then (apps were still in the wrong spaces after restart) cycling through every space using the arrow keyboard shortcuts. However, I know it’s only a matter of time before apps start shuffling around seemingly at random again. I just hope I don’t end up throwing my laptop out the window.
I’m sorry for the trouble. I know how frustrating this stuff can be when it doesn’t work right, and it seem the number of things that “just work” in OS X have been shrinking with each new release while the number of things that are “just fucked” has been growing rapidly! Not to pass the blame, because it certainly doesn’t help solve your issue, but the “app assignment” stuff is built into OS X, TotalSpaces just changes the preferences that controls those assignments.
Could you send me a screenshot of your TotalSpaces Preferences > Apps tab, so I can get a feel for how you’re assigning these apps?
The fact that you mention:
Even when going to preferences, TotalSpaces didn’t seem to know what space was currently active, because switching apps from one space to another to try and force a correction did not do anything to help.
This is surprising. Was TS showing the right Space # in the menu bar icon?
Naturally, after going through the effort of recording my screen to send to the fine folks at BinaryAge, I stumbled upon the true source of the problem, and that was MacVim’s fullscreen support (non-native so that multiple monitors are not rendered useless). Taking MacVim out of fullscreen mode made my problems unreproducible. I then proceeded to uninstall MacVim with Homebrew and reinstall it from scratch. So far, I’ve now been able to make use of MacVim’s fullscreen support without it completely screwing up Spaces/Mission Control/TotalSpaces. Hopefully this keeps up so I can continue using fullscreen.
At any rate, I hope this post helps somebody else with a similar setup to mine who is having the same issues. It was incredibly frustrating and killed my productivity for several days in the face of looming deadlines. Definitely not fun. I want to thank the BinaryAge folks for the very responsive support.