Mavericks update broke keyboard shortcut for switching Spaces

Solution 1:

I actually figured out how to fix this on the fly.

I believe this state occurs when you inadvertently make a swipe gesture while a ctrl-key is held down. I can't be sure of that, but the fix is to do exactly that: hold down the ctrl-key, and then do the desktop-switching swipe gesture (for me it is 3-finger swipe left or right).

I don't know how to prevent it from happening, but it's so quick to fix that it has become a non-issue for me.

Solution 2:

System Preferences > Keyboard, as seen here:

Only existing desktops will be shown here, so first add the desktops, then come here to check the boxes.

Solution 3:

Try this. Move the keyboard shortcuts plist file to your desktop. It'll be recreated when you log out / log back in again, with defaults set and should reenable your shortcuts.

1. Open Terminal. (LMK if you need more detail here.)

2. Paste this into Terminal and press Enter / Return:

mv ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.symbolichotkeys.plist ~/Desktop/com.apple.symbolichotkeys.plist

1. Log out and log back in again.

Your shortcut keys should be working again. If they are you can safely trash / delete the plist file on your desktop. We just moved it there as a backup in case it didn't fix the problem.