Assignment of Application to desktop not working for me

[RogerSC]

I have installed Dexpot 1.5.99 build 2003 on a Windows 7 Professional Edition desktop. And I've assigned the Chrome browser to desktop 8 (of 12). I use Chrome for reading pdf files since it has a built-in pdf reader. When I double-click on a pdf document icon on my desktop, I expect it to appear as a new tab in Chrome on desktop 8. Instead, I get another full instance of Chrome (including all my current open tabs) on whatever desktop I've doubled-clicked on. When I look at the task pager, I then see two instances of Chrome, one on desktop 8 and one on my current desktop. To resolve this split personality, I need to move Chrome on my current desktop back to desktop 8, where it somehow merges into one instance of Chrome. If I exit Chrome on my current desktop, it will also exit Chrome on desktop 8...

From this, I gather that there is only one instance of Chrome running on my system, and Dexpot is showing it in both desktop 8 and whatever desktop I use to click on the pdf document icon. Which is exactly what I thought that assigning Chrome to desktop 8 was supposed to prevent *smile*.

Is anyone else experiencing this behavior? Anything I can do about it? I find it annoying, especially since this feature is the main reason that I upgraded.

Thanks very much.

[RogerSC]

Okay, I gather from the lack of replies that this is the way that it's supposed to work. Guess I'll have to consider if I want to continue using it or not.

Thanks.

[jphughan]

Check Settings > Plugins and Extras, specifically the "When activating a window on another desktop" option. It probably is set to Copy. To have it behave the way you want, set it to Switch -- if you want it to just open the PDF on Desktop 8 WITHOUT switching your view there, "Do Nothing" MIGHT work, but if the app doesn't allow multiple instances (e.g. opening the same Explorer window twice in a row), then it will literally do nothing, in which case you might end up sitting there double-clicking something multiple times thinking it's not launching when in fact it's sitting on another desktop -- and if the app DOES support multiple instances, that behavior will cause it to open multiple times on another desktop.

What you're seeing now isn't actually a second instance of Chrome being created; it's the same instance of Chrome, just set up to appear on both desktops. Notice that any changes you make to the instance on one desktop will be reflected on the copy running in the other desktop; they're not independent.

A little exploration of the Settings interface and reading the documentation available on this forum goes a long way -- next time try doing that before you "consider if I want to continue using it or not" just because nobody replied to your (only 3 days old) post.

[RogerSC]

Thanks for the reply...yes, there are so many settings for this virtual desktop tool that some will get missed. Your suggestion does appear to give me 2 working choices, either of which is fine.

So thank you, and please try to cut those of us that are overwhelmed by the shear amount of settings available a little slack, too. I've never used a single tool before that had this many settings, most of which I've never needed to touch. For example, if I have an application set to stay on a particular desktop, how does it make sense to copy that application to my current desktop, I already asked to keep it on the assigned desktop? That gives me a "copy" of that application on the wrong desktop that if I then dismiss, gets rid of the original (hence the term "copy", I do understand that, that it is only one actual application, I mentioned that in my original question). The only way that I can see to get rid of that copy without killing the application is by moving the copy back to the desktop where I asked it to be assigned. That is not intuitive to me, and still seems to be a bug, even if only a usability one.

So that's why I thought this was a bug, since it didn't work as I expected it to, I didn't expect it to make a copy on my current desktop after I'd already specified that the application be assigned to another desktop, and it didn't occur to me that this could be the result of conflicting settings, since it just didn't make sense. Especially since this only happened with the Chrome browswer, while Internet Explorer behaved the way that I expected.

And every time I find something that doesn't make sense in a tool that I'm using, I have to question whether I really want to use that tool, since I can't predict its behavior. Again, assigning an application to a desktop means (to me) that if I bring it up on another desktop that it will come up on the desktop that it is assigned to, not make a phantom copy of it on my current desktop that I have to return to the desktop where its supposed to be in the first place so as to not kill the application.

So there you have it, my reasoning makes sense to me, probably not to anyone else, though *smile*.

And again, thanks, in the unlikely event that you've read this far *smile*.

[Patrick]

It is a bug, see viewtopic.php?f=29&t=3896. Should be fixed in the next version.

[jphughan]

Fyi, you can close only a copy of the application (rather than the entire application) in Full-screen preview. There's an entire page on this site devoted to things you can do in there, many of which I've found useful. You can also map a hotkey (by default CTRL+ALT+F4, I believe) to close only a copy of an instance; that's an especially clever default hotkey because the Windows command to close an app is ALT+F4, and the Windows command to close a given window in an application (e.g. a particular image file open in Photoshop, or a single tab in Firefox) is CTRL+F4. I can see the rationale of Copy for people who want to bring something temporarily to their active desktop without disrupting its position on the main desktop they want to assign to that application, though I agree the usefulness of that feature would first require you to train yourself to use the "Close this copy" hotkey. If something doesn't seem to make sense or be useful, it might be because you haven't figured out how it's connected to other functionality in the app and therefore the context in which it might function -- or it may be a feature designed for a completely different type of person with a completely different type of thinking and style of doing things.