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Sorting Full Screen Apps in OS X’s Mission Control

Trying to sort full-screen apps in Lion? Here’s how

  • System Preferences
  • Mission Control
  • Check “Automatically rearrange spaces based on most recent use

This allows you to organize your full-screen apps by alt-tabbing through them (yeah not the greatest).

Bonus:
I’m still trying to get used to the three-finger swipes and accidentally alt-tab once in a while. Alt-tabbing once I have my apps organized ruins everything. I’ve whipped up a automator app that simply toggles the preference for you. Toggle it to turn the preference on, sort your apps and toggle it again to turn the preference off.

Tab Settings.app

I’d love to see what people do with it. Here’s the raw apple-script:
tell application "System Preferences"
activate
set the current pane to pane id "com.apple.preference.expose"
end tell

tell application "System Events"
tell application process "System Preferences"
--get the name of every checkbox of group 2 of window "Mission Control"
click checkbox "Automatically rearrange spaces based on most recent use" of group 2 of window "Mission Control"
end tell
end tell

tell application "System Preferences" to close every window

Here’s an updated Automator Service that doesn’t show the System Preferences pane when changing the Alt-Tab setting:

  • Start Automator
  • Choose “Service”
  • Select the “Run Shell Script” action

Copy and paste this into the workflow:
current_value=$(defaults read com.apple.dock mru-spaces)
if [ $current_value = 1 ]
then
defaults write com.apple.dock mru-spaces -bool No
/usr/local/bin/growlnotify -m "Automatically Rearrange is Turned Off"
else
defaults write com.apple.dock mru-spaces -bool Yes
/usr/local/bin/growlnotify -m "Automatically Rearrange is Turned On"
fi

killall Dock

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