How to Restart Unresponsive or Misbehaving Spaces in Leopard [Mac Tip]

By Franklin Davis on Nov 27, 2007 filed under Apple, Tips | Comments

I am enjoying Leopard’s Spaces.app quite a bit, especially once I fixed the Finder issue. Most of the time I experience no problems, however, occasionally Spaces starts to misbehave or becomes unresponsive. The most frequent problem I have encountered is that sometimes Spaces will stop switching to the space containing the application I have selected from the Dock. This is very annoying, but fortunately there is a quick fix that doesn’t require you to logout or restart your Mac. Since Spaces is tied in with the Dock we can simply restart the Dock and therefore restart Spaces. To do so open up a terminal (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app) and enter the following command.

killall Dock

This should cause the Dock to quit and relaunch, hopefully fixing your Spaces problem in the process.

What Now?

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Philip Thompson 5 months ago 1 point
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If you're unable to open the Terminal by clicking on the Dock to open the Finder, do the following:

1. Click on the Desktop
2. Hit Command ("Apple" key) + Shift + u
3. Scroll down to Terminal and double click or hit Command + Down Arrow

Hopefully this helps!

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Franklin 5 months ago 1 point
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Good tip! One could also hit command + spacebar to bring up spotlight and type 'terminal' to launch Terminal.app that way as well.

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