A while back I was looking for a solution to restore my window setup when I went between being at my desk and bringing my laptop to meetings. I settled on Slate which is a great, lightweight solution to save your window positions and quickly restore them exactly as they were. Unfortunately, it can be a bit tricky at times to setup as you need to create a .slate file in your Home directory which is not something you can easily in Finder or even with a text editor like Sublime.
If you don’t have your file set up you’ll keep getting this error:
The dreaded “Could not load ~/.slate or ~/.slate.js”
Thankfully, it is very simple to resolve using Terminal. Just follow these steps.
Open Terminal and type (or paste in) the following commands:
cd $HOME
touch .slate
open -a textedit .slate
At this point, you’ll see a textEdit window pop up with .slate as the title. Save that file and you’re set!
Now, when you save your window positions in Slate (Take Snapshot) they’ll be stored for your next session and you can easily restore them (Activate Snapshot)
Big thank you to harzivi for their helpful suggestion on Github!