Many Tricks
Update: This hint is no longer necessary, as this functionality is now built into Witch (as of version 3.5.4). Only use this hint if you’re intentionally running an older version of Witch.
If you use Witch and have more than one display on your Mac (as I do), you may sometimes find it frustrating when Witch pops up on your main screen while you’re working on your second screen.
This bugged me enough that, at some point in Witch’s history, I asked Peter to allow the Witch panel to appear on whichever display contained the mouse pointer. Given how crowded Witch’s preferences already were, and that we weren’t certain this would be widely used, Peter created it as a hidden preference…which I then forgot to document in our release notes. Whoops!
I use Witch like this regularly now, and had forgotten it wasn’t standard behavior until I received an email this morning, asking about support for multiple displays. So for those of you who would like to make use of this hidden Witch feature, here’s how to do it.
- Open Witch’s System Preference panel and quit Witch.
- Open Terminal (in Applications → Utilities), paste the following text, and press return:
defaults write ~/Library/Application\ Support/Witch/Settings "Appear On Mouse Screen" -bool TRUE
- Open Witch’s System Preference panel and re-enable Witch.
Now when you activate Witch, it will appear on the screen containing the mouse pointer. It took me a few minutes to get used to the change, but once I did, it feels like the way Witch should work on a multi-monitor setup. (If you try this and decide you don’t like it, you can reverse things by repeating all the above steps, but change TRUE to FALSE in the Terminal command.)
We’re also looking at possibly adding an option to show Witch’s panel on all attached displays, but we need to test it and see if it slows down the interface too much.