Have a global floating window follow to other spaces/desktops

Targets macOS
1

Is there any way on Mac (including declares or MBS) to have a window or global floating window follow and appear on all spaces/desktops (“spaces” meaning the multiple desktops you can switch through using Mission Control)?

2

See collectionBehavior in NSWindowMBS in our MBS Xojo Plugins.
And the flags defined there in constants like NSWindowCollectionBehaviorMoveToActiveSpace.

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3

Thanks as always, Christian.

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4

So combinations of these work well for getting the window to other spaces but I haven’t found a way to display it over a fullscreen window from another app.

self.NSWindowMBS.collectionbehavior = NSWindowMBS.NSWindowCollectionBehaviorFullScreenAuxiliary + NSWindowMBS.NSWindowCollectionBehaviorCanJoinAllSpaces

Probably should work but doesn’t put the window in front of another full screen app.

5

So I found that the issue is a couple of things.

  1. The window has to be set as a Global Floating window, this probably is related to NSWindow.windowLevel but I don’t know if you can change level for a regular document window easily
  2. In the Window open event this code helps self.NSWindowMBS.collectionbehavior = NSWindowMBS.NSWindowCollectionBehaviorFullScreenAuxiliary + NSWindowMBS.NSWindowCollectionBehaviorCanJoinAllSpaces
  3. I also had code to hide the titlebar for the window, but apparently that’s what was causing step 2 to not help. Basicaly don’t use the code:
dim newStyle As UInt64 = 0 //no titlebar, not resizeable
if self.Resizeable then newStyle = 8 //no titlebar and resizeable

soft declare sub setStyleMask lib "Cocoa.framework" selector "setStyleMask:" (id As Ptr, mask As UInt64)
setStyleMask(Ptr(self.Handle), newStyle)

After removing that code it seems to be working now, just have to account for the differences in focus caused by floating/global floating windows now.

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6

As far as I remember, that just works as well.

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