I’m a registered user of TotalSpaces2 and was recently investigating TotalFinder to purchase it too. I’m actually running latest Mojave and TotalFinder seems a great purchase to do, except for a couple of quirks I can’t resolve:
One thing that was bothering me was that, if a Visor windows was opened during the session, when clicking the Dock icon it would be displayed again; instead of opening a new Finder window. By reading a lot of topics in this forum, I found darwin’s hidden setting here to fix it! But why isn’t this the default behaviour or an option in the GUI, that I don’t know…
As a user of TotalSpaces2, I have 9 desktops all the time. Desktop 1 is for many, non-full windowed apps and Desktop 2 is for Safari full-screen. The rest of the Desktops are completely empty and I use them, ad-hoc, when needed. The main issue here is that if I’m in Desktop 2, with Safari on full screen, and I trigger the Visor with Option+` shortcut, the Visor always opens in Desktop 9 (the last one); which is extremely cumbersome and useless, since I have to travel back to Desktop 2 then, via a direct keyboard switching or through a lot of trackpad gestures. I have tried Visor opening on Desktop 1 (as I would expect it to work, since I noticed you might not able to display the Visor on a full-screen Desktop), by having opened Finder there, leving it minimized or previously leving the Visor opened there; out of sight. In all of these cases, when I’m on Desktop 2, Visor keeps switching to Desktop 9, where I don’t have absolutely anything running. Any way to fix this?
The third thing is that the “PIN” blue icon/keyboard shortcut doesn’t work at all. Any window gets focused when click; even after pinning. Any ideas?
Thanks in advance for your support. I’m looking forward to purchase TotalFinder if I can work these issues out, so please let me know if this is possible!
ad 3) pinning just means that the visor window won’t auto-slide back down when it loses focus. I confirm that the keyboard shortcut “⇧⌘P” does not work anymore - it was taken by “Show/Hide Preview” in Main Menu -> View. I should assign visor pinning a different one.
ad 1) frankly, I was just lazy to expose it to everyone in the menu - I would have to document it and respond to user questions. Visor preferenes window is already quite bloated.
I thought that pinning meant that the Visor would stay on top, but on further testing, I understand now what it was supposed to do; which even after reading the documentation I though was to stay on top! I imagine that is something that can’t be done, right? The same as displaying Visor when I’m on a Space with a full screen window?
That leads me to my second (and most important, for me) point that stops me from fully embracing TotalFinder! The switching to the last available Space, when triggering the Visor and I’m in a Space with a full-screened window, as I described in my second point. Could you please comment on that, if that is something I could fix on my end or something?
Unfortunately I don’t know a good solution. A full screen app gets deactivated when a window of another app receives focus (Visor is just a special window of Finder.app).
Technically it is possible to mark Finder.app with LSUIElement flag, so it starts behaving as a mostly background process without windows. In this mode windows of LSUIElement-ed app can be placed on top of fullscreen apps and different mechanism apply. Unfortunately this has other effects to app behaviour and it is not suitable for Finder.app.
I guess, most people who use TotalFinder’s Visor accepted this and instead of full-screen apps they simply use maximized apps on normal spaces (as oposed to full-screen app spaces).
Thanks again for your reply Darwin. I guess I’ll have to adapt to that then.
I’d like to understand why the erratic behavior though, in order to try to replicate the “good” cases as much as possible. In the scenario I mentioned, I have 9 desktops with 1 having “normal windows” and 2 being full-screen Safari. When in 2, and launching Visor, do you know why sometimes it opens in desktop 1; other times in 9? I’ve tried switching desktops to see if it would open in the last I was, but it doesn’t. When “coming” from desktop 1 to 2, sometimes Visor opens in 1 and others in 9. Is there any logic you can think of as of how it decides where it will show? I would even prefer for it to always open in 9 while I’m in a full-screen window, but it’s not even consistent in that!
If this is not possible to control on my end, then perhaps, would it be possible for you to add a hidden preference (in order to not further clutter the UI, as mentioned), to prevent the launching of Visor via the keyboard shortcut when the user is in a full-screen desktop? That would, at least, prevent the random switches and having to scroll back 8 desktops, while blocking that random, unexpected behavior.
I’m sorry I don’t remember much. I haven’t touched this code for many years. I looked at the code and there is nothing about moving Visor window between spaces. Visor is placed on the current Finder’s space.
Have you seen this thread?
It suggests that macOS behaviour is that when you switch to an empty space it makes Finder active app on that space. That could explain that unexpected behaviour. Because that would effectively move Finder to that space for next Visor activation.
I think I found why it opens in desktop 1 vs. 9. When I trigger Visor for the first time, it slides-up in desktop 1. If I hide it (by pressing the same keyboard shortcut), the next trigger happens in desktop 9. Instead, if I close Visor (CMD + W), the next trigger happens again in desktop 1. I have tried like 50 times; one after another, and I was able to reproduce it. Let’s see if it keeps on working like this after more variables are introduced.
Thanks.
EDIT: just re-checked the TotalFinder options and, after disabling “Show in all Spaces”, it seems to always open in desktop 1; no matter if the Visor is hidden or closed. I’ll confirm in a few days!