10.6: Combining Spaces and Exposé in a single swipe

May 26, '11 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: raboox8

Snow Leopard only hintThis hint shows how to combine Spaces and Exposé to show all open windows on all workspaces, using AppleScript and BetterTouchTool.

Lion may have Mission Control but for Leopard/Snow Leopard users, it can be a pain to find a particular window among all the workspaces. The following AppleScript activates Spaces and Exposé together and orders windows by alphabetical order:

tell application "System Events"
  key code 100 -- F8 - Spaces
  key code 101 -- F9 - Exposé All Windows
  keystroke "1" using {command down}
end tell
It assumes you're using the default keys for Spaces and Exposé. Copy and Paste the script into AppleScript Editor, save it as a script and then add it as a gesture in BetterTouchTool under the Global section. I use the three finger down swipe gesture to activate the script.

The more RAM you have, the better -- on a machine with 2GB RAM, it took a second or two to run the script, whereas it runs instantly on a 8GB machine.

You can get BetterTouchTool at http://www.boastr.de. It's an amazing program to customize trackpad and mouse gestures to do pretty much anything.

[crarko adds: I haven't tested this one.]

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