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I’ve been too busy until now to really play with Desktop Manager (a virtual-desktop—or workspaces, or whatever you want to call it—implementation for Mac OS X). I gave up on workspaces when I first started using OS X, since there were (for a very long time!) no satisfactory implementations (and I was too lazy to write my own). Apple clearly feels that the solution to window clutter is Exposé, and while I agree in theory that Exposé is pretty cool, in practice I really haven’t gotten into it. I think what’s most frustrating about it (to me) is that it’s Fifty-Two Pickup with your windows: you still have to perform a visual search of the screen to find the window you want. (To make matters worse, most windows look pretty much like every other window: black text on white, or white text on black, or some slight variant.) I guess I just crave more structure in my window-search system.

So, back to Desktop Manager. It works, it’s fast, it’s pretty. Sold! There are a few twiddly features I’d like, such as more control over the desktop-name display, but that’s eye candy that I can hack into the code if I’m feeling really bored. Here’s a cute non-invasive hack that works with the codebase right now: slick numbers attached to desktop names, thanks to Unicode.

1. Open the Desktop Manager prefs; go to the Desktops tab.
2. Choose Show Character Palette from your keyboard menu. (You do have the keyboard menu showing, don’t you? If not, turn it on from the International pref pane.)
3. Be sure you’re viewing unicode blocks in the char palette, and scroll down to (and select) Dingbats. You’ll see some lovely sans-serif white numerals on black circles.
4. For each desktop (back in the Desktop Manager prefs), double-click its name to edit it, place the cursor at the beginning of the name, and then double-click the corresponding numeral in the Character Palette.

Now you have a nice, easily-visible numeral in the corner of your desktop (and in the pop-up while switching desktops).