Hi all, I am working on macOS 14.4.1 and I am having an issue with the Desktop Spaces feature. Calling
defaults read com.apple.spaces.plist
gives me a list of all current spaces, which reports the existence of a phantom Space that cannot be seen nor interacted with. The ID of that Space leads me to the following:
which shows that space 23 is associated with the Dashboard feature, that does not exist in Sonoma!
I have tried to:
- restart the computer,
- forcefully disable the dashboard with
defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES
killall Dock
Neither attempt erased the phantom Space, which creates conflicts in my setup.
I have tried completely disabling Widgets in the Preferences, closing all apps, deleting every space (including the "current" one, by creating a new one to substitute it) and restarting the Mac. After this, the id of the dashboard space changed:
but it is still there. I do not know which step changed its id, because to my knowledge the com.apple.spaces.plist file takes a while to be updated (https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/388449). But no hints on how to erase it.
The specific issues I am having are that this phantom space prevents any software that reads the Spaces state, to save it, from working correctly (e.g. DisplayMaid, Workspaces). In particular, I am now developing a Hammerspoon (https://www.hammerspoon.org/) module to do just that, to set it precisely to my liking: https://github.com/tplobo/restore-spaces. Listing the spaces to cycle through them always reports this phantom space, and since it cannot be identified as the "non-existing" one (up until the time it breaks one of the Lua commands that manage spaces), I am unable to exclude it somehow to continue development.
Is there a command to restart the Spaces feature, to completely erase all spaces and check if this removes this phantom Space? Otherwise, any alternative suggestions? I have already posted this in the standard forum, but no luck there.
Thank you,
