Recently I picked up a 13″ MacBook that I have upgraded some. It’s got Leopard, and I used Time Machine to restore all my settings and software from my now-neglected iMac.

The settings transferred included some for Spaces. Now, I tried Spaces and didn’t find it that useful, so I disabled it. But I didn’t clear out any preferences for it.

So since I’ve had the MacBook, whether I would use it solo, using Synergy with my desktop, or using a KVM with a secondary monitor, windows (primarily TextMate and iTerm) would go missing. Just totally AWOL, not display anywhere. I could hide/unhide the apps to my heart’s content, even restart the app. No dice, they’d stay gone until I reboot.

As it turns out, through an utterly random comment about a bug with some software that interfaces with Spaces, I decided to try clearing all my Spaces’ app assignments. Yes, Spaces was disabled. I still tried it, and that was the ticket, it turns out. With Spaces disabled, OSX was still trying to force TextMate to Space 2, for example, and with that not existing, it just disappears. Problem solved.

Fucking Spaces.