I grew up with this animation so I didn't consider it annoying until I bought a new Macbook a couple years ago.
I noticed sometimes I would press keyboard shortcuts before my system's focus had switched. Just little stumbles here and there, some inoffensive, some annoying, but who knows maybe I didn't catch enough sleep.
Over time it happened often enough that I decided to google it, and it turns out my muscle memory wasn't failing me; the animation speed did change ever so slightly and was slower in new Macs with 120Hz displays [1][2] (newer MacBooks, 2021+). If you switch your screen to 60Hz it goes back to the faster animation.
Why is this animation slower now, and why does it depend on screen refresh rate? I have some technical theories but can't think of an organizational reason it happened and hasn't been fixed 5 years later at a 3.82 trillion market cap company. If you Google it there's plenty of discussions online about this. It's noticeable and annoying to people who have used the feature often enough.
Wow I never realized I had this problem until now! I never even considered the reason keys would dispatch to the wrong window was because of the animation. I just knew that sometimes when switching workspaces I'd have to wait until whatever window I'm switching to has focus before typing.
I think Apple's self-image of being the epitome of design actually acts against them. Leads to monstrosities like Liquid Glass kinda vandalizing random parts of the UI in small ways that I intuitively read as "they are anti-anti-aliasing" not "they added cool refraction effects." It used to be you'd see something in a well-chosen color, now it is just a muddy kind of greyish brownish whatever.
I'd like to see them make some costly signalling to indicate that they are going to turn it around like maybe buy two Superbowl ads in a row and let the CEO make a personal apology.
Isn't going to happen because the competition is Microsoft and Intel and Dell who won't hold them accountable and it is just too easy to turn reject iPhone chips into netbooks in 2026.
> I think Apple's self-image of being the epitome of design actually acts against them. Leads to monstrosities like Liquid Glass kinda vandalizing random parts of the UI
I'm pretty confident many Apple employees have eyes, and thus are aware of how absurd Liquid Glass is (wtf, my iPhone capitalizes that but not a standalone i?!?!)
So assuming everyone at Apple isn't deaf (it's all over public discourse), blind (it looks bad), and dumb (no genius needed), then how does it get through? I can only see a few scenarios, none of which are good.
Maybe Apple engineers are afraid to push back on management?
Maybe management isn't receptive to their employees who voiced concerns?
Maybe key decision makers have pushed themselves into an echo chamber where it's difficult to hear concerns.
One of these has to be true, or some combination. But none of these are good, they are incredibly destructive to companies. Though also unfortunately common across monopolies. Iron Law of Bureaucracy hard at work...
I often think of that scene in Pantheon where they basically say they don't know what to do after Steve died. You can only laptops so small... and they're so small that anyone that puts on lotion is going to have an imprint of their keyboard on their screens... Steve wouldn't have accepted that
My pet opinion is that Steve Jobs was an asshole but an asshole that used his own products and used his powers of complaining to steer the whole ship to fix major "this annoys me everyday" bugs.
From my experience, "annoying but not blockers" bugs are often very neglected compared to (1) bugs that actually break things and (2) feature work. Neglecting quality of life issues leads to the "do you even use your product??" kinds of experiences.
Steve Jobs knew what he wanted and was willing to put his foot down in order to get it. Yea, I’m sure he was difficult to work with and drove people insane, but he was the plumb line that kept Apple driving in (mostly) the right direction. Now, it seems like they have bored designers trying to make a name for themselves with a “new” and “revolutionary” interface in Liquid Glass, which nobody likes and is less usable than its predecessor. But nobody ever got promoted for maintaining the status quo, so they are going to push forward. Steve’s advantage was that he never needed to be promoted.
The thing / issue at this point is though: how much is Jobs still responsible for Apple's ongoing success? He died 15 years ago, two years after Apple introduced "flat design" (to much criticism at the time but people got used to it). But after his passing, Apple's market value went from ~500 billion to ~4 trillion today, more than an 8-fold multiplication.
I find it hard to believe that his influence was so strong that it had an inertia that lasted for 15 years. Ive left his mark on it for longer.
I guess that depends on what you put into the word "success". I dont believe that great design work or great products and high market cap has ever been that related to each other.
With that said I dont think Steve built Apple alone either. And i think they have done some great things after his death as well.
Soo many things either work buggy, laggy, inconsistent, or don’t work at all
Filling bugs doesn’t help. And I don’t think anyone is inventive to fix bugs. Resolving sure. But closing WONTFIX or NEEDSINFO is also a resolution.
Most of what I do is chrome +Linux terminals and vscode anyway
And the only reason I’m on Mac is because of hardware, encryption, and ease of backup/restore/wipe, and the power struggle of Linux distros. freeBSD is not really an option
Interesting. I have worked with a CEO that did exactly that.
The product quality was just insane.
I have also worked with people in power who believed they were doing the same, but actually just had weird taste in interfaces and ended up screwing up the product.
I have not been impressed with Cook in the slightest. He came from Compaq, if I am not mistaken, and in many ways, I feel like Apple has become more Compaq-like during his tenure.
I mean, their damn phone keyboards are so bad I'm 100% confident that Tim only does voice to text on his phone. There's no way that the CEO of a company could use a keyboard that horrible and not want to fix it.
It’s SO bad. It makes me not want to use my phone anymore and physically go get my laptop if I’m chatting/messaging someone.
It’s probably the worst typing experience I’ve had since resistive-touch screens on PDAs. At least with them you could still type what you intended to though, just slowly.
I'm on 26.4 on a brand new 17 Pro Max, recently upgraded from a 13 Pro Max, and I have noticed absolutely no difference in the keyboard. It's still awful.
I've heard this advice before and I've tried it, and I really didn't notice a difference. I also, unfortunately, use swipe to type a lot. If I'm typing one handed I'm pretty much always using swipe. Sure it barely works, but that's the same as if I was typing normally so feels like a wash.
Keyboard works fine. Always has. iPhone just has so many users that there's going to be a plethora of passionate unpleasable nerds for every single facet of it. Even in your ideal virtual keyboard version, there was an army of people complaining that it wasn't a hardware keyboard.
I’ve never really disliked the keyboard. I’m not entirely sure what they’re talking about. That being said I’ve never used swipe to text so maybe that factors in, or never having had a smartphone other than an iPhone.
I have noticed this bug years before Apple started selling 120hz displays. I thought for sure they would fix it after that, but to my surprise it has persisted...
I think it must go back to High Sierra or Mojave at least.
I noticed this immediately when I first used a 120Hz macbook in 2021. As a vanilla MacOS UI feature that I'm sure many people use, I can't believe it hasn't been fixed yet.
Don't know about customizability on MacOS but I've always been very accustomed to animations and recently I just turned them off on Android and Linux and I... Don't miss anything. Turned out they don't add anything other than an initial wow factor.
Personally, I think some animations can help add context to what is happening. For example, when using QuickLook, there is an animation when opening/closing QuickLook that zooms out from, and then back to the file location. If doing something with that file after the QL, that little visual clue helps find it faster and know where it opened from.
I would assume it’s something based around whatever deacceleration animation it is calculating? So in the inverse of what you would see in games that don’t support uncapped framerates. It would at least explain why the refresh rate has an inverted relationship
I've been having the same problem, entering keystrokes in the wrong windows when changing spaces. I'm so glad to know it's not just me, it's the fact that I just a couple months ago bought a new MBP. Thank you!
I think Apple is making a really fatal flaw. Tbh Microsoft is doing it too.
Design good interfaces, with sane defaults but do not handcuff power users!!!
I often hear people say no one should care because there aren't many power users. They're a small portion, but that's absurd framing. They matter a lot because they're the ones that push your design language, develop new ideas, influence the general community, build new programs, find your bugs, and all of that. Apple and Microsoft are closing the ecosystems to get more control not only to exploit the users more (scrape their data) but to reduce bugs and things. But more and more people are trying these random programs because they can't figure out how to do things the right way. It's exactly why people are getting more frustrated with computers. The general public still doesn't care about data harvesting but they do care that the restrictions are handcuffing them now.
Funny enough this is also why Linux is becoming more popular. You've always had complete control but in the last 5 years the barrier to entry has plummeted. It's still not right for the average joe but it's on its way and a few more specialty distros are already there (e.g. steamos). The irony is Apple had the right idea before, even if not as modifiable as Linux, it used to be easier. But now it's more like a power trip. Consolidating control because they don't know what else to do
> I often hear people say no one should care because there aren't many power users.
You also have to consider that not all power users are the same. I’ve been using macOS since the G4 PB days, and would consider myself a power user. I get around in the os just fine and have for years. I also have never felt handcuffed. Some of the macOS 26 visual decisions are/were (some were already changed) questionable, but overall it was a solid upgrade IMO.
Sure, I tried to make it apparent that power users are different. Not one person does all those things I listed.
But as an example, here's an example of how Apple has broken my ssh configs SEVERAL times. The solution in this thread no longer works. I am not sure why Apple is so insistent that you cannot find the SSID from the CLI. It is ridiculous. Even more so that the answers have changed over and over. And btw, I am still on Sequoia and this command was patched out in a minor version... It feels hostile how often stuff like this happens
They're not doing that either.
And unfortunately bad designs are rarely fatal, so can linger for decades.
And animation time waste has little to do with power use, everyone suffers
Yeah it's really unfortunate. It doesn't take a genius to figure out transparent windows are not (usually) user friendly. Really it just requires eyes.
To be honest I think it's revealing of a bigger problem: yes men. People are too afraid of telling the emperor about his (lack of) new clothes. I see this a lot. Not just with CEOs but even engineers being afraid of pushing back on their managers. It's your job you voice your opinions, but it is also true that the manager is the ultimate decision maker. There's a healthy balance here and if employees are afraid to tell the emperor about his new clothes then many just end up resenting and talking behind their backs. You can't have a healthy team if people aren't allowed or even willing to voice their concerns.
I mean this could be solved really easily if the team that works on this exposed some settings to tweak the animation speed. They don't even need UI, people would find them anyway. The problem is the people who work on this do all the animations for windows etc. and I have no idea how they develop this stuff but presumably HI just comes down to them with some number they hardcode into their software so nobody can ever change it.
> They matter a lot because they're the ones that push your design language, develop new ideas, influence the general community, build new programs, find your bugs, and all of that
they used to care, but they don't now, because these corps have sufficient monopolistic control to not require "outsiders" to push their design language, develop new ideas, influence or programs.
In fact, it seems to me that these big corps want power users out, as they disrupt the agenda, find workarounds for "features" being pushed out that should have been mandatory for pleb users!
> [Linux is] still not right for the average joe but it's on its way and a few more specialty distros are already there (e.g. steamos).
i hope that is the future, because it's the only road to freedom for general computation. Unfortunately, the hard part is not the end user's acceptance of it, but the hardware manufacturers, who are being gripped by the balls one way or another. Unless they're willing to sacrifice any microsoft certification etc, they will be somehow beholden to them (may be not now, but certainly in the future when linux truly threatens window's dominance).
I see yabai mentioned, definitely check out Aerospace. Ive tried multiple WMs after years of i3 on Linux and this is the best one I found (for me) with quite a margin. It just works (tm)
Aerospace makes my Mac usable, but it is a looooong way from what i3 offers in my experience. i3 is way snappier, super stable, with good features out-of-the-box (including a status bar) - you forget it exists. Aerospace is slow, has to use that "windows in the corner" hack, it constantly resets whenever I resume the mac from sleep, needs additional tool for a status bar and more.
Much of it is not a fault of Aerospace, it's just what you get using Apple products in a non-sactioned way.
Another happy aerospace here! IMO it does a great job with barely any configuration required (the default config works great, I have barely tweaked it over years of use), that said I’m not exactly power user of tiling WMs, I have one app per workspace 90% of the time
When you want to quickly use apps without navigating away from your tiled workspace.
Especially transient dialogs, e.g. wifi/file picker. I would create rules in sway/i3 for those to keep them floating.
I've written at length about this topic on HN in the last month, so I'd hate for it to seem like my lil hobby horse, but something I've come to appreciate about the conventional "stacking" window solution of Windows/macOS is that it has a good answer for apps you briefly use.
I was a heavy macOS Spaces user. Upon a recommendation to use Aerospace from somewhere else here a few months ago, I switched and love it. I considered Yabai, but some features required disabling SIP (System Integrity Protection).
Just wait until you notice that it’s inexplicably slower on 120hz monitors and that your input devices remain focused on the previous space until the animation fully completes!
That's entirely app-level issue; the frameworks and the system itself is perfectly capable of handling this. [1]
It's just that for _most_ cases it's perfectly fine to make the users wait until the animations is finished, and handling users tapping multiple things in a quick succession can get annoying and unwieldy.
There are some apps when it's infuriating though, especially when they're quadruply badly engineered and _tie the internal logic state_ to the UI state.
As someone living in a country where I don't speak the local language, I swear at Google Translate engineers daily because I do a "swap the active pair of languages and then quickly launch the camera mode" combo _very_ frequently, and the selected pair of languages isn't actually updated _until the animation finishes_.
It's maddening. [2]
[1]: A quick demo: tap an app on a Springboard to open it, and very quickly swipe up from the bottom to hide it. You'll absolutely be able to interrupt the animation of it launching.
[2]: I'm actually sorta guessing that this is a workaround for a different bug they had; when if you tapped this quickly enough a couple of times you could end up in a situation where the UI displayed a different pair of languages than the internal logic had, so they added that delay, but who knows, maybe I'm theorycrafting too much.
3 people from my team recently switched to macOS and they never owned a mac before and they are all complaining about window management.
Do you know how dumb it makes me feel to have to tell them they need to install third party apps just to make their system somewhat usable? it's insane.
I switched to Fedora Asahi Remix[1] after being affected by this bug[2] after 5 releases of MacOS Tahoe. I am enjoying Asahi Remix with Gnome and it has sensicle window management.
I also switched, but to https://asahi-alarm.org/ (the arch variant) with Sway, right after Software Update ignored my choice to NOT upgrade to Slophoe.
Same same. I'd been a die hard mac user since System 6 in the early 90s, but last year I switched to Asahi Linux and my next hardware may or may not be from Apple.
I recently had to switch to macos for work and Jesus Christ is this not the pinnacle of engineering. Sure, I'm accustomed to my self configured Linux desktop but boy is Mac OS slow to use and hard to configure.
And so keyboard unfriendly.
Then in System Settings set "swipe between full-screen applications" to "off" in Trackpad settings under "more gestures" so that BTT's shortcut applies instead of the system-level one.
Works well. No extra software needed if you already have BTT, which is worth the money for me purely for "alt+drag a window from anywhere" style window movement. That setting is buried deep under BetterTouchTool Settings → Window Snapping & Moving → Moving & Resizing Modifier Keys: https://cleanshot.com/share/mnF9xBkW
Also great from the same developer BetterSnapTool. This is always the first software that I install on my Mac as it allows me to move windows around with keyboard shortcuts. There's many others doing that but I have a license already and only use these 5 key mappings.
I tried both. BetterTouchTool does support the no-animation left/right space actions, but on my machine InstantSpaceSwitcher felt a bit snappier for actually moving between spaces, so I kept that for my keyboard shortcuts for previous/next space and direct jumps to a specific desktop. I still use BTT for Mission Control / spaces preview. So for me the final setup is: InstantSpaceSwitcher for fast space switching, BTT only where it still adds something.
I like that BTT lets you tune the swipe gesture sensitivity too (Settings → Trackpad → Swipes). I made it more sensitive (0.15) and swiping between Spaces feels very snappy.
After a restart, and after Finder has opened multi-tab windows I have open before, clicking on a tab can suddenly move my view and the window to another space.
Apparently different tabs in the same window can think they belong to different spaces.
Something (I perceive as) common to a lot of the (perceived) increase in Apple software glitches recently, is I cannot fathom the logic for which the bug makes any sense. It does not feel like I am seeing corner case bugs, but instead major "bad-model" code, revealing its poor design.
Clever hack. Now if there were some way to bring back the OS X 10.5/10.6 2D spaces grid… the linear design in place since 10.7 has always felt overly simplistic.
That is indeed the biggest thing I missed so much. When I finally moved from macOS to KDE I got the grid desktops back and I love them so much.
I have 9 virtual desktops and a 3x3 grid is so much easier to navigate than a row of 9. Also, Apple makes them dynamic now. I have each desktop assigned to a specific purpose. It's like having 9 computers at my fingertips.
Almost every release of macOS after 10.6 or so dropped something I used and the replacement if any was rarely good enough. So it started rubbing me the wrong way, more and more with every release. I'm so glad I'm no longer on an opinionated OS but that I have a desktop environment that cherishes configurability and options.
In keeping with this, for the transition animation you can choose several options like a fade and a slide, you can turn them off completely (as this hack does for macOS). You can even set the speed of some transitions. I have it set to slide but faster than normal. So the sliding gives me a little spatial awareness of where I move within the grid, but it still feels snappy. All just by ticking some options. I love KDE <3
I've tried KDE but unfortunately too much of it clashes with my preferences, even after spending quite a lot of time tinkering with its many config options. It's a nice project but I don't think it'll ever be for me, despite carrying features from older versions of macOS.
It is very good even though it's in early development. Issues are getting fixed almost as fast as I can find them. I have to use macOS sometimes for work and OmniWM made it bearable.
As someone who never uses spaces or any window manager, what am I actually missing? What’s wrong with cmd tab and just switching between apps?
Is this going to be some
Kind of major epiphany?!
Spaces is what used to known in Linux as virtual desktops (maybe it still is), and that is how I think of it. Or as virtual monitors. Right now I have desktop one for local system iTerm2 and Firefox, desktop two for client 1 (terminals, IntelliJ IDEA), desktop three for client 2 (VirtualBox, terminals), desktop four for incidental stuff that needs a mostly empty desktop, and desktop five for Chrome (for things that need it), and GIMP and Inkscape (as needed). This way everything stays where I put it, including which windows over which other ones. So I can switch to D1 to look up some documentation on a function, then back to D2 to use that knowledge. Or on my personal laptop I can keep my coding project up one desktop and do the daily web surfing on another, and just switch desktops to have the coding project right where I left it.
(You do use a window manager, btw, it's the thing that puts the title bars on your windows and lets you move them around. On macOS it's integrated in, but on Linux you have to choose one. There are many, all of which have some failing. Except for sawfish, whose failing is that it is no longer maintained.)
I did an exhaustive comparison of window managers and settled on using Raycast for simple resizing (full screen, center, mid-size centered, 1/2, 1/3, 2/3 left/right) + FlashSpace[1], which implements simple virtual spaces with instant switching.
You can also use Rectangle or Spectacle or others in place of Raycast.
+1 for FlashSpace. I used to be an i3 user and MacOS workspace management drove me mad. For years we had TotalSpaces, but that is no longer being maintained. With FlashSpace I finally have a great setup.
My solution has been binding a key Hyper+[a-z] for my applications. When used in conjuction with FlashSpace I get a usable setup. I also heavily rely on native MacOS binding Cmd+` (backtick) to cycle the currently focused application, and mission control for the current workspace.
Let me know if this is interesting; I've been considering creating a YouTube-video about this setup.
Wonderful, that leaves 2 things on the top of my list for spaces: having to hover your mouse over the top left corner of a space and waiting until it shows the closing icon. And Safari deciding its better to switch to a space and open a window that was minimised there instead of just opening a new window in the space i'm currently in (even with the "switch to a space" setting turned off!) when 1 want to open a new tab.
If you hold command while you restore the window from the dock it will restore into the current space. I wish i knew how to make this the default. Getting whisked away to a random space is one of the most irritating issues. Like when you want a finder window for downloads and instead of a new window in the current space you get taken cross country to on thats already open.
Thanks! Now I'm curious of all the places where there are still hidden Options key features that I haven't discovered yet. It's just everywhere, but so undiscoverable.
At least the setting does work in reducing the switching when you cmd-tab to an application with no open windows in the current space. But I think some of this annoying switching behaviour is application specific logic and they just didn't get it right with Safari, some other applications do get it right though.
Hey! I built InstantSpaces (which you had linked in the footnotes) and am well aware of issues with the injection & patching. It works 90% of the time for me and was good enough for me to share. But there are cases where it bugs. And yes, Tahoe is a to-do.
I will hopefully soon have the time to try to make it more robust. Feel free to take a shot at it if you want!
Hey, author here, and cool project! I spent some time comparing Yabai's scripting addition to InstantSpaces' scripting addition. They seem to be doing the exact same thing, but Yabai works while InstantSpaces doesn't, and I eventually gave up trying to figure out why.
Regardless, I still prefer InstantSpaceSwitcher because its implementation is simpler and it doesn't require disabling SIP. If you can get it working, however, I can edit my blog post to say so!
This is nice. Sounds like it wouldn't solve the slow animation when entering or leaving full screen mode though. I'm fed up enough with macOS's poor window management (among many other things) that I'm looking for MacBook alternatives.
The M5 chip is way ahead of Intel's latest, even Panther Lake. But the Snapdragon X2 Elite looks like a viable alternative. It's the only competitor with comparable single core performance, and it comes with 48 GB of extremely fast RAM for a reasonable price with great battery life. Unfortunately Linux support isn't really there yet, but hey M5 MacBooks don't support Linux well either.
if youre using a firefox based browser, slow fullscreen for media can be fixed by setting the full-screen-api.macos-native-full-screen flag to false in about:config
Is there a tool which eliminates the animation, also when switching between apps with cmd+tab? I almost never use ctrl+→, I just know what application I want to switch to.
All these apps that I tried only fix the ctrl+→, but not application switching
I'm still incredibly frustrated by Apple's Mission Control and Full Screen features. The old Expose and Spaces and windows-style maximise would be so much better.
I agree that I miss when spaces could be on a grid in Snow Leopard instead of only in a straight line, but what is wrong with Exposé? From my POV it works the same as it always has.
IIRC Expose is now called Mission Control (four finger swipe up on my system).
My problem with it is that it's useless if you got more than few windows open - the preview is just too small to actually see which window you are after (it's all padded for the looks). IMO if they actually used tiles, potentially grouped by app - it would be so much useful.
Yabai looks cool tho, but requires so much permissions and potentially disabling system integrity protection that IDK if it's a go for me.
I don't have a Snow Leopard Mac in front of me to compare, but as far as I can tell, four finger swipe works the same way it always has. It's hard to find targets if you have dozens of windows open, yes, but I don't remember old Exposé being any better in that regard. I think one or two macOS releases had some kind of "Mission Control UI" in the bottom half of the screen when you did the swipe, but that's gone now and the entire screen is used for the tiles.
Can you explain more about what regressed since the old Exposé? I'm just not seeing it.
Stop using MacOS spaces. Never full screen anything. Throw everything around with hotkeys using OSS rectangle. Use shortcat to automatically bring your cursor to anything on your screen and use enter to click and type.
Spaces are not for fullscreen but for basically virtual desktops i3 linux style
Here is superior user experience:
1. Install moom. Its keyboard windows arrangement is second to none. Its two-step tiling is a killer. Ie caps-a to show a popup with all the shortcuts, then “a” letter for vertical 1/3 of the screen. Or s for middle 2/3. Or q for top left third — you can assign any letter for any portion of the screen.
2. Use option1-6 to switch between desktops
3. For example alt-4 is a desktop where you have all on one screen (suppose you have 6k xdr like i do): safari, mail, messages, telegram, hey email, reeder
alt-3 is your productivity desktop where you have things, calendar, basecamp, notes, ia writer
alt-1 and 2 is for your main work like rider ide or what have you
Alt-5 for your remote stuff like remote desktop, servers, what have you
—
So with this you have a mental model of where everything is always and instant switching to it. Want to see your todos and notes? Alt-3. Want to see your browser and messaging? Alt-4. You get it.
Moom is better than tiling manager for screens like 6k 32” xdr.
Otherwise tiling managers are perfectly fine. For instance on windows I use komorebi
This is similar to how I use Spaces. I haven't hotkeyed desktops, but each one is designated for a particular task or theme. The concept extends further with a secondary display, with the primary monitors' spaces being assigned "main task" duty while the secondary displays' spaces get "aux task" duty — so e.g. IDEs and browser windows immediately relevant to the task at hand go on a main monitor desktop while secondary display desktops are used for things like chat, music, and documentation.
This is a core part of my workflow and is one of the reasons why I would have a difficult time using Windows as my primary OS: its virtual desktop support is far too weak in comparison. It can't even switch desktops independently per-display.
I tried to live like this for a while but found I could not separate applications into spaces
I would try setting up a space for, eg, all my communication stuff. But suddenly I’d need to drag-and-drop an image from my image editor into Slack. Or I’d want to drag a graphic from Safari into Final Cut Pro. Or any number of cross-workspace operations
How do you handle this with spaces? Do you initiate the drag, tap the space hot key, then drop?
You don't need to full screen anything to use macOS spaces for O(1) app-switching, instead of O(N) by pressing Cmd+Tab repeatedly to linearly scan your list of applications.
The rule is simple: one app per space, and Ctrl+{1,2,3…} switches to the corresponding space in O(1). For me space 1 is an IDE + terminal, 2 browser, 3 messaging, 4 bug tracker, 5–6 AI agents etc. It was fast to learn: get a DM, press ^3; to file a bug, press ^4 etc. I use this with the Rectangle app for window tiling, and this combination works great for me; I rarely ever use Cmd+Tab.
I also have a personal menubar app that's very similar to SpaceName, to quickly get the current ID when multiple spaces have a similar layout (e.g. terminal takes the left half, a browser the right half).
Similar I just use RayCast Hotkeys to bring mostly full-sized apps of my choice to the forefront and not worry about much. I'm also just optimizing around a small single screen setup these days for focusing on stuff.
This is one of those classic examples of software feeling ‘heavy’ for reasons that have nothing to do with hardware limits. People often talk about performance in terms of benchmarks, but interface latency on routine actions probably matters more to happiness than a lot of headline metrics. Nice work.
The animation has bugged me for years! Thanks to the blog post, I found out that BetterTouchTool - which I am already using - has this feature since a couple of versions and now I could enable it. Wasn't aware of that, sometimes the solution is so easy.
You can use yabai without any of the tiling functionality (set the default mode to "float"), I have actually been using it with BTT to fix this exact problem. Thanks for letting me know that a fix has been added directly to BTT though!
I love using (tiling) window managers, and one of the most important requirements for me is having a key binding for switching to the last active workspace. The proposed solution in the blog doesn't achieve this. I use Aerospace on macOS right now and think it's the best solution available.
I generally have fixed workspaces for different things: first for a browser, second for a code editor, third for a terminal, and so on. If I want to switch between the browser and code editor, I can do that with a single key binding, usually Alt+Tab. The same binding lets me switch between the code editor and terminal just as easily.
When you have something like 10 different workspaces, not having this key binding becomes annoying. If you need to alternate between windows on workspace one and workspace eight, you're stuck using both hands to press Control+1 and then Control+8. But with a last-active-workspace key binding, you can just Alt+Tab between them. This is the killer feature I always need.
I struggled with the same annoyances for years. Then I installed TotalSpaces... but I think that stopped working. Liquid Ass destroyed my iphone and apple watch and I was able, thank god, to stop it from infecting my MacBook. At the cost of the newest updates.
Awesome! Is there a working way to do the same for Windows virtual desktops? I remember I used to do it with ViVeTool [0], but Microsoft removed the feature flag at some point.
Specific extension I use that became unusable (black text on black). However, if you look closely, you’ll see a lot of differences in look and feel that don’t seem “animation” related.
I'm new to MacOS, is the thing they're refering to when you swipe left/right with three fingers to switch between different fullscreen apps / desktops? I kinda like the animation, after decades of windows I'm still impressed when switching between programs isn't stuttery.
Yes, and the app they're recommending emulates that swipe, but really really fast, so it looks instant. And you don't have to swipe 8 times to go from #1 to #9.
It get annoying after a while, especially if you're swiping a lot, such as having an IDE and test app / Simulator in one space and a browser in another.
I'm not a big space-switcher on OSX, mostly because each of my applications come with spaces (browser, IDE, etc), but unskippable UI animations are an instant roadblock.
Looks like HN hug of death killed your comments section though:
> An error occurred: API rate limit already exceeded for installation ID 65180581.
This looks interesting and I will give it a try. I agree that the space-switching animation is painful.
I don't however think that this will solve spaces on MacOS, for the simple reason that opening new instances of apps is inconsistent and often doesn't behave how you'd expect it to once one more than one space is involved (in my experience, anecdotal).
I've come to peace with the fact that I will never be able to simultaneously experience the productivity of i3 and the necessary evil of MS Office/Illustrator on the same OS. The most important factor in my work is who I work with (rather than what I work with) so I'll remain on the latter train for now.
> There are only two problems: for one, yabai does this by binary patching a part of the operating system. This is only possible by disabling System Integrity Protection at your own discretion. For the second, installing yabai forces you to learn and use it as your tiling window manager1. I personally use PaperWM.spoon as my window manager. Both of which are incompatible when installed together.
I was referring to their last line ("I will never be able to simultaneously experience the productivity of i3 and the necessary evil of MS Office/Illustrator on the same OS") not the linked article because the parent doesn't "think that this will solve spaces on MacOS" therefore I gave a suggestion that would.
Secondly I don't find anything that bad about why the article's author doesn't want to use yabai, I generally disable SIP anyway (because I want to install anything I want without restriction, even edit system files because that's necessary in some cases, as yabai does); and they just don't want to learn a new WM which is fine for them but isn't a valid reason for everyone to not use yabai.
> for the simple reason that opening new instances of apps is inconsistent and often doesn't behave how you'd expect it to once one more than one space is involved
System Settings > Desktop & Dock "Automatically rearrange Spaces based on most recent use". This is the critical part.
And then right click App on the Dock, Assign to this Dock.
With these two things, Spaces becomes predictable and repeatable.
Interesting. It doesn't bother me at all, but the animation on Windows 11 to switch spaces feels very unsmooth to me and drives me crazy. Here I was wishing it was like the one on macOS.
Apple being completely oblivious to what normal people actually need or want is like bad weather- can’t do anything about it (Apple is so big and unregulated), just try not to forget to take an umbrella.
Nice. I wrote a little menubar app and Space switching has been a thorn in my side, including going down the "Yabai integration" route. Will have to take a look at this and see if I can borrow some ideas!
does Aerospace still require disabling SIP? kind of needed as my mac is a work laptop.
I would appreciate if anyone has i3/sway keybindings that work alongside this, otherwise I might just vibecode something in Swift. I know that there is some window management keybinds within System Settings, maybe I need to look into that also, but I don't think they'll behave the way I want them to
No it does not require disbaling SIP and it is inspired by i3 though I have never used i3 and it has customizable keybindings , you can also use karabiner to bind keys for it.
I didn't check if it makes any difference, but I see hardly any animation with “Reduce motion” enabled.
The article mentions this has the unfortunate side effect of also setting prefers-reduced-motion in browsers, but that can be mitigated by changing the browser settings (Firefox: about:config: ui.prefersReducedMotion. 0 (enable) or 1 (disable)).
The thing that most bothers me is that there seems to not exist a good solution for spaces that allows a grid set of spaces, like the one you can configure on Linux Gnome DE. That thing was so useful...
Honestly, this animation in one of the best things about spaces in macOS. I use the four finger gesture to switch spaces all the time and it make the spaces feature so much more natural than all other window managers I’ve used before
Agreed, that’s one of the things I miss most when using a Windows machine at work. Something about the animation makes my workspace feel bigger in a way that the Windows multiple desktop feature is just missing.
Technically Windows does have an animation when switching desktops with the trackpad, but it’s so jittery that it’s annoying. And the desktop image takes seconds to update, and only updates after completing the animation. To me this is one of those “death by 1000 missing bits of attention to detail” problems that plagues Microsoft/Windows.
Can you use this with the trackpad gesture though? That's the only thing that has me locked in, the muscle memory of trackpad is hard to beat for me and unfortunately I rather suffer through the animation then move to the keyboard
Thank you so much. This is finally the perfect tool. I am using a 160hz monitor and the switching times were driving me crazy. (The higher the refresh rate, the longer the animation takes...)
The giga brain move is to stop using MacOS spaces. Never full screen anything. Use an OSS window management tool like `rectangle` (similar to deprecated `spectacles`).
Use shortcat to bring your cursor to any element with just typing.
I don't use Spaces at all, probably in part because of the speed. I can't bring myself to run an application all the time to solve this, when it should just be a variable somewhere that needs to change.
I think it was iOS 9 that had some glitch where the animations were completely disabled and it was a really awesome experience to click an app and have it instantly open with zero animations.
I can organize related windows by task, so if I have two things going on which both involve say a Finder window, a Safari window, and some other assorted things, I can switch between tasks as a group with one gesture instead of cmd-tab which will pull up both Safari windows or both Finder windows, and then maybe needing to cmd=` to switch to the correct one.
When I'm in the appropriate space with only those related windows, the exposé gestures are also much more usable than when everything is jumbled together.
Because it makes you have to think before moving. If I am on Chrome and want to go to my code editor, I have to press CMD+Tab, see what position the code editor is in and press CMD+Tab x times to go there.
If I uses spaces, I know exactly where my editor is, where my browser is, it is one key press away and it is always there. I use aerospace and I divide my spaces using Alt+ the qwerty keys. Q=chrome W=code editor E&R=programs open for what I am working aka Postman or Obsidian and T=MS Teams.
My dock on MacOS is always hidden because I don't need it and now I have more screen realestate.
For me, I use spaces constantly to help me organise/compartmentalise what I’m doing. It lets you group related windows, where command tab only brings you one window at a time.
One example would be if I’m working on a document that draws on others I have written. Put all three in a space and that piece of work is nicely organised.
When I have all my windows in one space I find it messy and stressful and it’s harder to find what I want.
Overall spaces are more compatible with the way I think than command tab.
I personally don't, even when I'm doing heavy multitasking on a 13" laptop. Only exception is if something needs to be full-screen.
It can make sense if you're keeping a lot of non-full-size windows on a larger screen and working on separate tasks that are in the same application, meaning cmd-tab won't help.
I use spaces constantly, and I’ve never thought about the animation - I don’t think I’d ever noticed it to be honest. So it’s really interesting to read all the comments here about how frustrated people are with it. This is not a defence of it just genuine interest - I bet there are totally different parts of the OS that bother me that don’t bother others also.
Try it on an ultrawide monitor. For me it's literally nauseating to leave it turned on, as in, it actively triggers motion sickness with a monitor that width.
I'm a little afraid of the failure modes, frankly. Clever, but that seems like it would b likely to exercise some under-tested timing situations. I'm not familiar with that API, so take the hunch with a grain of salt.
I've seen this sentiment often. For example, in a discussion about slow nvm load times: "Does adding 0.5s delay to opening your terminal really affect your productivity?"
I agree that these small things are not bottlenecks to my productivity. I can work just fine despite them. However there is some intangible effect they have on my mindset when I'm working. The more "snappy" my computer feels, the easier it is to enter a sort of flow state. Small bits of friction here and there add up.
Single monitor workflows — which are more ergonomic — make switching spaces a necessity. It might not impact productivity but it is annoying as hell switching around spaces a lot
I was never bothered by the animations, but was livid when they redid the desktop thumbnails, and offered no way to always show the preview by default. You have to mouse up to them to get the previews.
It didn’t seem to bother the rest of the Mac world, but I used to organize my desktops in a chaotic way that worked great for me, and the ability to see the preview thumbnails as soon as I popped into mission control or whatever they call it enabled me to quickly go where I wanted to after a quick glance. I used to rename entire desktops, too.
The whole thing instantly became worse for me when they took away my ability to name your own virtual desktops, and added the extra speed bump of making me mouse up to trigger the previews. I’m still bitter about it.
Rectangle with Alt-Tab (both open source), the latter is especially useful as I hate macOS' application- rather than window-level switching, Alt-Tab returns it to Windows-like behavior.
I'm a bit reluctant to draw attention to my solution since it was written to scratch my own itch and I have only had a handful of users other than myself. Last year I was seriously thinking about making linux my dev choice because coming back to a machine that had slept left me with several minutes of reorganizing the windows that had jumped to various spaces as the multiple monitors were recognized. Aerospace could put them consistently somewhere but it couldn't distinguish windows of same app. I built WinPin for that use case but then kept going to solve other things that have made using a Mac with multiple screens and dozens of windows that need to be organized around my workflows easier. I built in support for workspaces but really haven't used that myself since spaces were more of a necessary evil to organize windows rather than useful in themselves. Interestingly to make WinPin truly useful you have to turn off spaces because I can't figure out a way using what Apple gives me to determine which space a window is in.
If anyone would like to try the app out (https://winpin.app) I'm pretty confident that downloads and update flow are working and it has been running without issue for me on multiple macs for the last 4 months. There are a lot of edge cases I'm sure I haven't seen yet, but it has truly changed my workflow and I'm interested to see what others think. Please don't try to purchase a key, it is fully functional without one. I'm still working on that with Polar.sh and want to make sure my t's are crossed and i's are dotted. Gotta be one of the weirder posts to HN since I actively do not want to sell you something right now.
I use https://rectangleapp.com/ and enjoy it. I have shortcuts to move windows to the left/right half of the screen, and cycle between monitors. This, combined with native cmd+tab and cmd+` is enough for me.
This doesn't answer your question, but Aerospace (tiling WM) has been good for me to not use spaces. I don't mind spaces in theory, but the slow animation, for whatever reason, just really irks me.
My Cmd-TAB frustration is I'm usually moving the mouse while I press it, causing the mouse to select some unwanted app. It doesn't help that the row of apps forms a solid bar across the center of my display.
Wish I could ignore mouse movement when the app switcher is displayed.
Aerospace with opt+key to go to that space, cmd+opt+key to send a window to that space, then just make a mental map of where everything is. I use mnemonics like always putting discord on workspace "D" so it becomes quite fast
I have a vestibular disorder that makes this animation extremely disorienting and it's been so discouraging that apple won't do anything about it. I just stopped using the feature all together! Honestly it's an accessibility issue and apple should be ashamed... Maybe even liable for not doing anything.
And it's for me an absolutely indispensable app which I'd happily pay more for. The UI is a bit weird, but it's fantastic how many little tweaks it enables. A Mac without it feels clunky to me.
Worth it! Easily one of the first things I install on a new mac. I have three finger swipe left/right to switch between tabs, three finger swipe down to close tabs (chrome, vs code, xcode, finder, anything that has tabs), and four finger swipe to go between spaces without animation.
I eventually became so frustrated with spaces in OSX, that I essentially try to avoid using them in macOS these days. Seriously, all I want is a way to move windows from one space to another via keybindings. I am not asking for much. In fact, IIRC, I think Snow Leopard had this feature. I know there were various solutions that cropped up, and even currently there are a few hacks. It just... such bullshit that it's not built in.
If one has a disability that hinders his or her ability to use a mouse/trackpad, then I strongly suspect there is no way for such a person to use spaces on macOS well. Though, it seems Apple could not care less.
You know Apple lost it and have become what Jobs most hated when the instructions to suppress an obvious UX flaw in macOS read like a registry tweaking hack for some atrocious UX in Windows, ca 2005.
I installed Debian stable + i3 + x11 on a desktop today - what a breath of fresh air (not that I'm new to Linux) compared to MacOS. No bloat. No animations. No lag. A perfect tiling WM.
No Secure Boot, no TPM, no SIP, no phoning home to the mothership to check if I'm allowed to launch an app, no spyware, no telemetry, no update nags, no trying to trick me into upgrading to the next major version.
I tried Sway & Wayland but IntelliJ freaked out so I went to x11
Also Nouveau seems pretty damn good these days.
KeepassXC works much better on Linux which is nice.
I'm keeping my M4 Macbook Air around for a while to play with local LLMs but it's not exactly the best for that, so I'll think it'll be on eBay not before long, because MacOS is getting more and more annoying...
Imagine being so intelligent to do so many things with a skill set, yet choosing to spend so much time on an animation that can be measured in microseconds. The proportions are staggering. Truly bizarre to me how something I’ve never even noticed while using the feature could drive a person to this level of obsession.
I had a similar stance on this until I went through macOS -> linux with i3 -> back to macOS transition. i3 window and workspace operations on a maxed-out Dell XPS were truly instantaneous, and after moving back to macOS, there is no way to unsee the slugishness of the native window operations.
I'm using Aerospace at the moment, and it gets pretty close, but still isn't as nice as i3.