Hello everyone, I was just wondering if there was any way on Snow Leopard to disable exposé from "activating" on certain applications–– if that makes any sense. The reason being is that I use the stickies app pretty heavily and have a ton of collapsed notes all over my desktop. On 10.5 Leopard, when I activated exposé, all the sticky notes would just arrange themselves on the side, with larger windows such as Safari taking up more space on the screen. With Snow Leopard, exposé tries to give every window an equal amount of space– resulting in a tiny collapsed sticky (shaped like a tiny bar) having the same thumbnail size as a Safari window! With over 20 collapsed stickies floating around, this can get quite irritating as activating exposé turns into a hunt for "which window doesn't look like a sticky". I hope my point is coming across clear here–– I just woke up, and I'm still a bit groggy.
In system preferences, when you are setting the screen corners or the function keys, you can hold down modifier keys (⌘, option, ctrl, or shift) in any combination, and those keys will be required to activate Exposé, Dashboard, etc.
Thanks for your reply, ijingo, but that wasn't what I was getting at. I wasn't asking if the keys to activate expose could be modified; rather, I was inquiring if exposé could be disabled for certain applications. Sort of like how Spotlight searching can be disabled for specific folders or volumes, I want exposé not to display the windows of specific applications. Hopefully the screenshot below will help illustrate my point. As you can see, my stickies, the majority of which are collapsed, take up an inordinate amount of screen space when exposé is activated. This is because Snow Leopard tries to give each window the same amount of real estate. The results in each individual sticky being assigned the same amount of space as a large Safari window.
As far as I know, you can't do that natively. Perhaps there's a third party app that will allow you to do that. Just a thought though, have you considered using spaces and having the stickies assigned to one space in particular? That way if you activate Expose, it won't show up except for that one space.
There's no way you can do it except for a modifier key that I can think of. It simply means that without the modifier, Expose won't be activated. Unless you want to do it with Terminal and disable keyboard shortcuts and mouse clicks. found this and this might help. Disabling Exposé Exposé is a tougher beast, because, as far as I know, there's no way to completely disable Exposé. The only way to "disable" it is to make it so there's no way to invoke it, by disabling all the keyboard shortcuts and mouse clicks that trigger Exposé. The best way I've found to do this is to go to the Dashboard and Exposé pane in System Preferences on one Mac, and manually disable all the keyboard shortcuts and mouse clicks. (You do this by setting the popup menus to a value of "-"). Then, go to ~/Library/Preferences/ (where ~ is your home folder), and fetch the file called "com.apple.symbolichotkeys.plist". You'll then need to transfer this file to all users on every computer on which you want to disable Exposé. I did this by first copying the symbolic hotkeys plist file to /Library/Preferences/ on all the computers via Remote Desktop. Then, I ran this UNIX script as root on all the computers through Apple Remote Desktop: for i in `ls /Users/` do cp /Library/Preferences/com.apple.symbolichotkeys.plist /Users/$i/Library/Preferences/ chown $i /Users/$i/Library/Preferences/ chmod 700 /Users/$i/Library/Preferences/ chown $i /Users/$i/Library/Preferences/com.apple.symbolichotkeys.plist chmod 600 /Users/$i/Library/Preferences/com.apple.symbolichotkeys.plist done This'll copy the symbolic hotkeys file from the global preferences folder to the preferences folder for each user. It will then make sure the permissions on both the user's preference folder and the preference file itself are correct. (Note that this command will probably generate some errors for "Shared", ".localized", and ".DS_Store" which also live in the Users folder, but these errors are harmless. I'm a bit lazy to modify the script to exclude these, but if anyone else wants to, feel free.) Once you do this, Exposé will effectively be disabled on all users for the Macs to which you copied this plist file.
@ijingo: I think that's going the complete other way. I think he wants to have Expose up and running, just not having a mess of Stickies in it when he brings it up. @danieldy: Have you tried my suggestion? -Go to System Prefs>>Expose & Spaces -Click Spaces -Enable Spaces (though it seems to already be up in your screenshot) -Click the "+" button located in the area below "Application Assignments" -Select Stickies or go into "other" and find it in the dialogue box that comes up. -Find Stickies in the Application Assignments area, click the double arrow all the way to the right, and assign it a space that you tend not to use. Or expand the rows & columns such that you have an extra space available and assign stickies that one. If you do the above, stickies will only show up on Expose (as well as the desktop) if that Space is the active space. This works well if you assign Spaces to an active screen corner in Expose or assigning a Keyboard shortcut for Spaces so that it's easy to switch.
Thanks and yes spaces is the way to go. Sometimes when I activate Expose on an active space, 2 applications will come out even the 2 are assigned on different spaces. Its just that the inactive application rests under (the line below the active space). I assume OS X remembers the last application you've been.
@ijingo: That's only if you minimize the application. If you keep them active and on screen (e.g. danieldy keeping all his stickies active on his desktop), they won't show up "under the line" if Expose is activated. If you collapse Stickies, they are still active (i.e. non-minimized) and will only show up if Expose is activated in the space to which you assigned Stickies.
Yes got it. Thanks rafaelc378. Its just that how come only the last visited app shows up under the line. I have 4 apps running. What does this mean?
@ijingo: The apps that show up "under the line" on Expose aren't the last visited apps. They are apps that you have running whose windows you have minimized. Everything that's above the line are apps that are running but whose windows aren't minimized. If you have assigned apps to spaces, only the ones active (non-minimized) assigned to that space will show above the line. The minimized apps of ALL spaces will show up under the line.
I agree with rafaelc378's suggestion as that's how i do it too. i have 4 spaces, acting as quadrants and i assigned some applications to be activated only in a certain Space/quadrant, i.e. word processing applications in Space 2, design programs in Space 3, media players in Space 4, and browsing on quadrant 1 which is also my main Space. My Stickies are to be lodged in Space 2. You may drag a sticky note to another Space, but it'll still pop up in the assigned Space the next time you open it.
I agree with rafaelc378's solution, Spaces will let you control which apps Exposé displays. However if you don't need Stickies' floating window trick, you could use Dashboard's Stickies, which are functionally similar and it gets tucked away under a nice keyboard shortcut, and won't clutter up your app switcher or Exposé screen. Granted Dashboard's Stickies will not collapse to a single line or resize to a bigger text area, it's still pretty much the same functionality. If you miss those features you can use the k-note widget. Then again... I did miss Stickies from System 9... when OS X came out.., Now I use Things... But I do use the Dashboard Stickies for trivial things. Just a suggestion .
Thank you for all the suggestions, everyone. rafaelc378: thanks for the spaces suggestion. assigning stickies to a infrequently used space was my current workaround before coming here and asking my question. primo: i also use Things though admittedly not as much as i should. I use Things like a to-do list for more serious matters. i use dashboard to make random notes to myself and as an ongoing list of trivial matters like things i want to cook, books i want to read, and clothing i want to buy. i suppose most of the lists can be incorporated into things.
