Mission Control

swallace
Contributor

I need to disable "Automatically rearrange Spaces based on most recent use" in Mission Control for state assessment testing. Doesn't look like I can do this in PPPC Utility. How are you configuring this in your environment? 4a77b98537674f9dbd090d4cc839c026

4 REPLIES 4

t_jones
New Contributor III

Did you figure out a way to do this?

swallace
Contributor

I have not figured out to do this just yet, but needing to get back to it quickly. Do you have a solution? I haven't asked Jamf just yet. Covid hit last spring and testing season is creeping up again.

snowfox
Contributor III

@swallace Hi there,
See below for what I did in order to track down the setting (5 - 10 minutes):
There's a program you can buy called FSMonitor (https://fsmonitor.com) (or a 14 day free trial is available) that allows you to see file system changes in real time when looking for 'what files get updated' when you click a button or setting.
From this you can see that when you click that option you are referring to (mission control spaces), the currently logged in users dock plist file is being updated.

bde761135cf24625b962b2d9eb011b1a

If we then look inside the file using BBEdit to see what is changing each time the mission control spaces option is clicked we see a setting near the top of the file called mru-spaces that keeps changing from true to false and back again each time the setting is changed.

6cc5d2fc727f4294a237df7c1a01ce69

You could create a customized dock plist with the setting turned off and add it to the 'custom apps & settings' payload in a configuration profile.

You could alternatively put it in the default user template folder depending on the macOS version you are using. In more recent versions where the system volume is now read only, the default user template folders have moved to the /Library folder instead of the /System folder.

Once you've got your setting disabled (I don't know if you can lock it) you can hide the mission control icon from appearing in System Preferences by using the 'Restrictions' payload in a Jamf configuration profile to disable the mission control icon from being clickable.

66162f3075e0476885f0b06f6e633f99

This answer is not a definitive solution but hopefully it points you in the right direction.

swallace
Contributor

@snowfox This is great! Thank you so much for sharing. I'll give it a try tomorrow.