Native Instant Space Switching on macOS

638

PPaulHoule 4 days ago 323 commentsRead Article on arhan.sh

HI version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.

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Discussion Sentiment

60% Positive

Analyzed from 10167 words in the discussion.

Discussion (323 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

aylmao•4 days ago

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.

[1]: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/256124324?sortBy=rank

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNBWt4NvqHg

veber-alex•4 days ago

This is such an insane bug to still have around all these years.

Are apple engineers not using macOS?

PaulHoule•3 days ago

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.

godelski•3 days ago

  > 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

alsetmusic•3 days ago

> too easy to turn reject iPhone chips into netbooks in 2026.

You mean the flagship chip from their former pro phones? I was with you until you said this. Makes you sound out of touch or ideological.

I think they've been on the worst design tear since they went to OSX for the past eight-ish years. At no point does their awful software design intrude on their awesome chip designs.

My partner's first Mac is a MacBook Neo and she loves it. Pink. Looks pretty good. Does what she needs. Not right for me, probably not right for you, but what I'd tell my mother to buy if it existed when I told her to buy a regular MacBook Air.

harrall•3 days ago

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.

lynguist•3 days ago

I… think that actually Liquid Glass was put on the iPhones to make sure that older iPhones that still have relatively fast chips can show up finally slower than the brand new ones, and that with this stress there’s again a much larger slope in difference between an older iPhone and a newer one which causes enough nagging in users to upgrade = buy a new one.

ryanmcbride•3 days ago

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.

sen•3 days ago

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.

vvillena•3 days ago

The behavior of the iOS keyboard also showcases how there must not be many decision-making people who communicate in multiple languages.

Barbing•3 days ago

If Tim used speech to text we’d be at least testing SotA local voice models in the iOS betas

JoeBOFH•3 days ago

Most of my issues were fixed when I disabled swipe to type. Not all, but most.

jurplel•3 days ago

This, along with circle to search (for translating, mainly) are the current main things pushing me to stay on Android.

testing22321•3 days ago

Why are you paying money for something that you find so terrible when there is a perfectly good alternative.

Life is too short to waste is using junk you don’t enjoy.

fizwidget•3 days ago

In my experience iOS 26.4 did largely fix it btw. Update if you haven’t already.

mrguyorama•3 days ago

Even if they did, what are they going to do? File a bug report that will sit at the bottom of the priority pile forever?

Devs don't set priorities. Software "Engineers" largely don't get to engineer at all.

fragmede•3 days ago

Stockholm syndrome. Moving between spaces is fine! What are you talking about?

You get used to it and then it's not a big. Stop holding it wrong!!!

amelius•4 days ago

I wouldn't be surprised. Their 3D solid modeling is done on Windows, so why not their electronics.

abustamam•3 days ago

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.

alsetmusic•3 days ago

I believe I first learned to shorten animations on MacOSXHints.com (gone now). Regardless, I learned a lot of great "enhancements" here:

https://github.com/mathiasbynens/dotfiles

And here's the blog of the person who ran MacOSXHints.com:

https://robservatory.com/make-your-macos-dock-suck/

Fun aside, I'm pretty sure that my mention of a system issue that I read about that morning on MacOSXHints.com was a helper in landing a job in an interview that afternoon. What I mean is, I said, oh are you talking about "whatever thing on that site today…?" and it demonstrated that I was familiar with whatever internals.

abustamam•3 days ago

Nice resources! I've use MacOS for over ten years and I never really modified anything other than my zshrc. I'll check then out!

juujian•3 days ago

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.

al_borland•3 days ago

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.

mort96•3 days ago

The closest thing you can do on macOS is to turn on "reduced motion". This doesn't remove any animations, it just replaces them all with fade animations which take the same amount of time.

fragmede•3 days ago

and set it to 60hz instead of 120. And install the tool that the article links to.

bschwindHN•3 days ago

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.

mort96•3 days ago

I also have a 120Hz Mac, and the animation is indeed slower in 120Hz mode. In my opinion, the animation crossed the line from "too slow but bearable" to "unbearable" with 120Hz. It is as you say; it's not really the animation itself that's the problem, but the delay from when I tell my machine "switch to this other workspace" until the focus switches to a window on that other workspace. The animation has this horrible ease-out effect where the last few centimeters take what feels like forever.

Getting a 120Hz Mac actually completely changed my whole macOS philosophy. I used to use spaces extremely heavily. I now almost don't use them at all, preferring window switching with cmd+tab instead.

The infuriating thing is that almost all discussion on this on the web just says "turn on reduced motion". Not only should that be unnecessary; it doesn't even fix the problem! Sure, there's no longer a sliding animation, but there's now a fade animation instead which takes just as long.

It's completely incomprehensible that Apple hasn't fixed this.

Sadly, solutions like BetterTouchTool and InstantSpaceSwitcher won't work for me because I prefer to use my trackpad to switch spaces.

EDIT: I actually recorded and compared the switching speeds a while ago: https://old.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/rfmg4e/workspace_swi.... Apologies for the choppy recording, QuickTime screen recording is not very good; but it gets the point across.

fifafu•3 days ago

> Sadly, solutions like BetterTouchTool and InstantSpaceSwitcher won't work for me because I prefer to use my trackpad to switch spaces.

One of BetterTouchTool's first features ~17 years ago was trackpad gesture customization, it is still one of the most important things you can do with BTT! ;-) You'd just need to assign the "Move Right a Space (without animation)" and "Move Left a Space (without animation)" actions to trackpad gestures in BTT.

mort96•3 days ago

I don't want it "without animation", I like that the animation tracks my fingers and that the response is instant and doesn't wait until a "gesture" is "triggered". I just want it to wait a second after I let go until the target workspace starts receiving input.

tranceylc•4 days ago

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

presbyterian•3 days ago

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!

jurplel•3 days ago

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.

theredleft•3 days ago

we are a certain type of people here, aren't we?

godelski•3 days ago

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

matwood•3 days ago

> 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.

godelski•3 days ago

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

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41633547

mettamage•about 16 hours ago

> Design good interfaces, with sane defaults but do not handcuff power users!!!

Hello iPhone :)

eviks•3 days ago

> Design good interfaces, with sane defaults

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

godelski•3 days ago

  > They're not doing that either.

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.

kingstnap•3 days ago

Is it fear or just a checked out mentality? I can easily see devs at corps just doing whatever is asked by management to the minimum standard and calling it a day.

Particularly if there is a corporate push for efficiency (tautologically true) or the dev is an offshore worker who stands to gain nothing from being prideful in their work.

chii•3 days ago

> 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).

saagarjha•3 days ago

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.

godelski•2 days ago

  > if the team that works on this exposed some settings to tweak the animation speed

Honestly I don't know why it isn't more common to expose more stuff. The entire reason the computer is a tool everyone has is because it's so customizable. Everyone's computer (including phones) is different, and that's a good thing! No one has the exact same programs installed, they all customize to their use cases. It's pretty rare to find machines that are identical and that's really only going to happen in very controlled environments. It'll never happen with personal devices, including personal work devices

xz18r•4 days ago

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)

https://github.com/nikitabobko/AeroSpace

charles_f•3 days ago

I love aerospace, but you can definitely feel that it's a hack on top of the macos window manager. If a window starts misbehaving (like, app is frozen or sometimes even just has a top dialog) then aerospace can't move it and you lose its immersive aspects. I also keep getting floating windows lost in the outer limits of the outside wotld, and have to use the native "move to center" in this situation. Oh and that issue with tabs in ghostty or item is annoying - but once again not something aerospace is really responsible for.

With all that said, short of being able to use i3, this is a fantastic WM, couldn't imagine not having it. Use it in combination with karabiner to remap your caps lock key, and suddenly caps lock becomes how you move in macos.

tytho•4 days ago

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).

Wilder7977•3 days ago

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.

nathanwh•4 days ago

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

wett•3 days ago

Same here. My only complaint is I wish there was a way to make apps floating by default and then you would specify which ones you want tiled.

IME a lot of apps are easier to use in their default state. I really only use my web browser, text editor, and terminal in tiled mode.

wlonkly•3 days ago

You got me thinking, and this seems to work for me. I didn't test if the order of these blocks matters.

    [[on-window-detected]]
       if.app-id = "com.github.wez.wezterm"
       run = ["layout tiling"]

    [[on-window-detected]]
       if.app-name-regex-substring = '.'
       run = ["layout floating"]

lolive•3 days ago

When exactly do you need floating windows?

- a happy ion2/i3 user since forever -

imgyuri•3 days ago

for ghostty users check out https://ghostty.org/docs/help/macos-tiling-wms

alper•3 days ago

The main reason I use Aerospace (after a thorough testing of most macOS third party window managers) is for the space management and instant space switching.

tcoff91•3 days ago

Aerospace is incredible.

TMschar•3 days ago

Another happy Aerospace user here!

TMschar•3 days ago

Also paired it with sketchybar!

supersrdjan•3 days ago

It worked great when I switched from yabai some time ago but now it seems to be constantly losing windows and I have to keep resetting it :S

airstrike•2 days ago

Matches my experience. I've been resorting to `Window > Move & Resize` in the menubar to get those rogue windows back which is faster than restarting but still quite annoying...

tptacek•4 days ago

God damnit I didn't know until 15 seconds ago that the Space-switching animation in macOS was annoying. Thanks a lot!

el_benhameen•4 days ago

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!

JumpCrisscross•4 days ago

> our input devices remain focused on the previous space until the animation fully completes

This strikes me as the fuckup more than anything else.

mvkel•4 days ago

This is true in iOS, too. Taps are ignored until any animation completes. Must be deep in the code!

klausa•3 days ago

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.

qudat•4 days ago

It’s insane and the worst part about Mac OS

veber-alex•4 days ago

Window management on macOS is just trash.

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.

jurplel•3 days ago

I have noticed this bug since... I want to say High Sierra? It was the inspiration behind this project.

duskdozer•3 days ago

If you don't want to go insane try to forget before you notice everything else. Might be too late already once you first do though

Cider9986•4 days ago

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.

[1] https://asahilinux.org/fedora/ [2] https://youtube.com/watch?v=JjptYWKGVc4

mort96•3 days ago

Oh yes, I've also suddenly had my workspace switcher turn black! Never happened before but it has started happening lately.

macOS has never been bug free, but it feels like they've really been working hard to introduce new bugs lately.

bananadonkey•3 days ago

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.

ireflect•3 days ago

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.

Nevermark•4 days ago

Tangentially related.

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.

Eric_WVGG•3 days ago

> Pay for a license for BetterTouchTool. Enable “Move Right Space (Without Animation)” and “Move Left Space (Without Animation)”. > I managed to find [another solution] with none of the aforementioned drawbacks.

I don’t consider paying for quality software a drawback!

I’ve been using BetterTouchTool ever since the 2016 Macbook Pro with Touch Bar, so I guess that’s a decade now. It turned the Touch Bar into the best productivity enhancement I’ve ever experienced from a laptop, and evolved to suit even more use cases beyond the Touch Bar.

I consider it completely indispensable, and I doubt it would still be in (very) active development today if fans like me weren’t paying for it.

egorfine•about 2 hours ago

This is insane. I wanted this so, so much since the very first macOS that had Spaces. I am so grateful.

cosmic_cheese•4 days ago

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.

wolvoleo•4 days ago

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

cosmic_cheese•4 days ago

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.

klausa•3 days ago

> Also, Apple makes them dynamic now.

I don't understand why they do this at all; but at least it's still a single checkbox you can toggle off, FWIW.

(Desktop & Dock -> Mission Control -> "Automatically rearrange Spaces based on most recent use".)

phren0logy•4 days ago

Having been ruined by Linux options like Hyperland and Niri, I’m digging my early foray into OmniWM - https://github.com/BarutSRB/OmniWM

yuters•4 days ago

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.

bigfudge•3 days ago

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?!

prewett•3 days ago

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.)

coldpie•3 days ago

> What’s wrong with cmd tab and just switching between apps?

Open 3 terminal windows. Try to switch back & forth between just two of them with a keyboard shortcut (without mentally tracking whether or not to press Shift). You can't.

Open a browser and two terminal windows. Try to switch between one terminal (your editor) and the browser window (your reference docs), without also bringing the other terminal above the browser window, covering up your docs. You can't.

> Is this going to be some Kind of major epiphany?!

If you don't use several windows per app, probably not. But, I do, and macOS's window manager is awful for it.

dbmnt•2 days ago

> Open 3 terminal windows. Try to switch back & forth between just two of them with a keyboard shortcut

cmd+` gets me there, no problem at all

> Open a browser and two terminal windows. Try to switch terminal and the browser window, without also bringing the other terminal above the browser window

you got a point there. alt+tab is gonna surface both terminal windows above the browser.

jzer0cool•3 days ago

Using built-in tooling (settings) could anyone share your ways to get to app + switch to correct window.

sgloutnikov•3 days ago

Just simpler to navigate and less cognitive load, pressing a key and going where you want to go. Here's a video from ThePrimeagen with some examples.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdumjiHabhQ

ivanjermakov•3 days ago

Sort of. With proper workspaces you land directly on the full screen program with a single hotkey. No cmd-tab switching needed.

grantith•3 days ago

You don't technically need workspaces for this with app/window hotkey assignments via raycast or hammerspoon, for example.

sgloutnikov•4 days ago

Same boat and whoa this looks nice! Will give it a try thank you!

buster•3 days ago

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.

donfotto•about 14 hours ago

Same for me even with vanilla ubuntu. "It just works" used to be true for macos, and linux was for tinkering. Now, Ubuntu "just works" (and fast!).

I want a system that works out of the box with sensible defaults. What a strange turn of events that this is a linux system now.

flawn•4 days ago

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!

ArchAndStarch•4 days ago

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!

aequitas•4 days ago

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.

jhogendorn•3 days ago

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.

sparqlittlestar•3 days ago

Press Option to immediately show the close button

aequitas•3 days ago

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.

vict7•4 days ago

I have been dealing with the same issue and thought I was going crazy that the setting which purports to fix this exact behavior simply doesn’t work?

aequitas•4 days ago

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.

draw_down•4 days ago

For #1, holding the option key makes the x immediately appear on all of the spaces.

tern•3 days ago

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.

Foolproof with zero magic.

[1] https://github.com/wojciech-kulik/FlashSpace

chrisvalleybay•3 days ago

+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.

gloxkiqcza•3 days ago

I would love that video.

bfirsh•3 days ago

Here's a script to install and configure, in case it's helpful for anyone's dotfiles: https://github.com/bfirsh/dotfiles/blob/48eff70daa754216eff9...

modeless•4 days ago

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.

mixtureoftakes•4 days ago

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

nicoburns•4 days ago

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.

Analemma_•4 days ago

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.

dzhiurgis•3 days ago

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.

Analemma_•3 days ago

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.

tnightengale•4 days ago

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.

piskov•3 days ago

You don’t get it

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

cosmic_cheese•3 days ago

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.

piskov•3 days ago

Like I’ve said, on windows you have komorebi that does exactly that

interpol_p•3 days ago

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?

piskov•3 days ago

> Do you initiate the drag, tap the space hot key, then drop?

Yes.

That’s why with trackpads I enable three fingers for dragging, so I don’t need to press anything

—

Also if you drag your file and hold on app’s icon in dock, it will show that app

ericholscher•3 days ago

This is exactly what I do -- but I have space split up by persona (Personal, work 1, work 2, Play), and then each space is managed with Moom. Love it.

jbverschoor•3 days ago

You will still run into shit when one application instance is used in two spaces

Finder, chromes, etc. it will cause automatic switching.

Also, cmd-tab doesn’t have a filtered mode for the active space

Cmd-~ actually works better when using stage manager, because it goed through all active windows across all apps

weakfish•3 days ago

I'm really confused - I downloaded Moom because of this comment, but can't find a feature to switch Spaces. Am I missing something?

piskov•3 days ago

Moom is not for switching spaces.

You can use the app in in this post for that.

—

Or if you want the animation, switching is built-in on macos

What you need to do:

1. Create 6 spaces. This is a crucial first step.

2. Go to system settings — keyboard — keyboard shortcuts… — mission control — expand mission control — manually set “switch to desktop 1” to alt-1; rinse-repeat till 6.

3. Go to system settings — desktop and dock — disable “automatically rearrange spaces based on most recent use”

taude•4 days ago

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.

option-cmd-o BOOM, outlook opt-cmd-g Bang, Ghostty opt-cmd-v POW, VSCode opt-cmd-s Boff, Slack etc etc...

ALSO: I learned this from some prior thread on something similar.

Barbing•3 days ago

How does that compare to using Alt Tab? And I forget if you have to suffer through any animation at all when you do it that way

taude•3 days ago

No animations for quickly switching to displaying apps in the foreground

I do use alt-tab, to switch between the multiple windows of the same app. (Something's happened with my AltTab config, not sure if it's due to corp background system software or a Tahoe update, but I no longer see the mini screen shots of the different window states.)

thamer•3 days ago

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).

Starmina•4 days ago

Yeah well, I'd like to see your face when you find out that each time you fire shortcat it makes one HTTP request, yikes.

modernerd•3 days ago

> Pay for a license for BetterTouchTool. Enable “Move Right Space (Without Animation)” and “Move Left Space (Without Animation)”.

I did not know BTT supported this until today!

You can just set up the trackpad 4-finger swipe actions globally: https://cleanshot.com/share/P0K1PGC1

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

submeta•3 days ago

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.

fifafu•3 days ago

that is weird, BTT's space switching should really be instant when used via keyboard shortcuts. (Developer of BTT here)

One advantage of BTT's current implementation is that it still allows you to move windows to the next/previous space while dragging them and simultaneously executing the "Move Left / Right a space" action. In that case there will be an animation but it will at least work.

submeta•1 day ago

It was my fault. Misconfiguration. Just upgraded the license to get this „without animation“ feature and highly recommend BTT.

modernerd•3 days ago

Your blended setup makes sense.

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.

dewey•3 days ago

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've set it up the following way: https://img.notmyhostna.me/8tck91QCL7DB9N8l3d3q

modernerd•3 days ago

Nice, I use Raycast for this (with global shortcuts from Raycast settings): https://www.raycast.com/core-features/window-management

benji-york•4 days ago

By way of experience report: I've been using this app for a week or so on my daily driver and it's been great.

donfotto•about 14 hours ago

I was using a new macbook pro and another machine with ubuntu. Compared with ubuntu, macos is soo slow I had to stop using it.

jjcosgrove•3 days ago

[video]

just sharing for sh*ts n' giggles... inspired by this post and a previous annoyance i had around spaces in general... i just 'vibe coded' (don't start) this using codex this morning (built upon InstantSpaceSwitcher's UI)

https://www.jjcosgrove.com/assets/videos/spaced.mp4

basically:

- you can set custom names per space

- you can hotkey-navigate to each space/any space

- it has a visual indicator in menubar (active/vs inactive in case you use mission control)

- you can show a nice grid overlay (to click or arrow-nav to a space)

- it has unified shortcut/name management via UI (rather than needing a seperate util)

names are retained on restarts, spaces are synced if mission control creates any (as best as you can with mac's private apis).

for personal utilities like this, it works quite well and sometimes its good to just have 'fun'

oh and the 'jank' relates to how spaces works (i think), but can be removed/avoided by enabling 'reduce motion' which i think the original post mentions.

adamnemecek•4 days ago

What do people use for Windows-like window management on macos? I tried a bunch of them and I'm not a fan of any of them.

I actively dislike the notion of spaces.

dmoose•3 days ago

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.

satvikpendem•4 days ago

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.

probabletrain•4 days ago

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.

ubercore•4 days ago

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.

pahomov•4 days ago

Contexts app is perfect for win-like alt-tabbing https://contexts.co/

fellowniusmonk•4 days ago

I use the r+cmd app for deterministic app switching.

Caps mapped to right command.

Karabiner to map dual-cmd+jkl; to mapped vertical slice so j is left quarter, j+k is left side, etc.

dual-cmd+i moves windows between screens and dual-cmd+u rotates current window through full, top half, bottom half.

The whole thing is deterministic and super fast and gives me more permutations than I'll ever need.

Tempest1981•4 days ago

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.

airstrike•4 days ago

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

reaperducer•4 days ago

What do people use for Windows-like window management on macos? I tried a bunch of them and I'm not a fan of any of them.

I actively dislike the notion of spaces.

What do people assume Spaces is a Windows thing? It was on Unix systems decades ago.

guessmyname•4 days ago

Every [*] macOS user uses Rectangle.app — https://rectangleapp.com

The ones who don't use it is because they don’t know it exists.

Or they are still using the (deprecated) Spectacle.app — https://github.com/eczarny/spectacle

[*] if you wonder why I say “every user” even though it’s obviously not true is because everyone loves hyperbole in this website.

cloudfudge•4 days ago

I can prove everyone doesn't love hyberbole because I have found a counterexample, but I cannot prove everyone doesn't use Rectangle.app.

primaprashant•3 days ago

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.

ArchAndStarch•3 days ago

Actually, that was just recently merged into InstantSpaceSwitcher!

aesopturtle•3 days ago

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.

ivanjermakov•3 days ago

Amazing how much effort is needed from a billion dollar company to make a feature present in my 1kLOC window manager.

mintplant•4 days ago

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.

[0] https://github.com/thebookisclosed/ViVe

AaronFriel•4 days ago

Turn off "Animation Effects" in Settings and it will be instantaneous.

lll-o-lll•3 days ago

And VsCode will not display dark mode correctly.

AaronFriel•3 days ago

Oh that's a surprising interaction. I use dark mode themes, is there something I haven't noticed?

littlecranky67•3 days ago

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.

Fraterkes•4 days ago

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.

rahimnathwani•4 days ago

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.

rwc•4 days ago

Now do it 100x every day and see if it gets old :)

alpaca128•3 days ago

> I'm still impressed when switching between programs isn't stuttery

It is stuttery when you use the magic touchpad via Bluetooth, same applies to the cursor. It's very noticeable with slow movements.

satvikpendem•4 days ago

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.

hhh•4 days ago

it just blends into the background for me personally, i found it annoying a little when i swapped from multiple monitors to one

mabedan•3 days ago

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

gib444•3 days ago

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...

skupig•3 days ago

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!

hirvi74•3 days ago

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.

ray__•4 days ago

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.

FireBeyond•4 days ago

> 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.

satvikpendem•4 days ago

Why not use a macOS i3-like window manager like yabai or komorebi (paid)?

lynndotpy•4 days ago

This is addressed in the post.

> 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.

satvikpendem•4 days ago

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.

niij•4 days ago

You can turn tiling off

`yabai -m rule --add app=".*" manage=off`

tnightengale•4 days ago

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.

IOT_Apprentice•4 days ago

BetterTouchTool is $25 for a lifetime license with upgrades.

koch•3 days ago

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.

Cockbrand•3 days ago

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.

mixtureoftakes•4 days ago

how can I do this with it?

dcre•3 days ago

It says it in the post: there’s an action you can map to keys for “move right a space (no animation)”.

DDayMace•3 days ago

I much prefer gnome for multiple desktop switching and app switching in general. Seeing this article I know there are many on macos who agree!

albertjs•3 days ago

I've been using option 1 (reduced motion) since I got my first MacBook years ago. Trying to fix the browser issue you mentioned is how I discovered Chrome flags. I now `open` chrome with the `--force-prefers-no-reduced-motion` flag.

This looks great though, will give it a go!

gechr•4 days ago

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!

Shameless plug: https://github.com/gechr/WhichSpace

rendx•4 days ago

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)).

keerthiko•3 days ago

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.

joeevans1000•3 days ago

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.

Apple. You suck.

msephton•3 days ago

Synthesizing a really fast swipe to remove the transition is absolutely genius.

isodev•3 days ago

> Apple has continuously ignored requests

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.

jbverschoor•3 days ago

They use a clean work Mac for just work.

It’s like having a dedicated space for a few apps and folders. No wonder they don’t care

hmokiguess•4 days ago

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

gryfft•3 days ago

I'm in the same boat. The thing is that I like the first half of the animation when it matches the speed to the keyboard gesture. The second half of the animation after you let go, the speed suddenly slows. It feels like an attempt to skeumorphically adapt those drawers you can't slam, that have an air cushion that blunts the momentum and have magnets to draw it the last few millimeters shut.

If I could just "slam" back and forth with the three finger gesture I would be happy. Nothing is going to break from slamming my workspace side to side, I don't need to be protected. Those last milliseconds of the animation, when keypresses still don't point to the target space, are really annoying. I would like to just remove the "air cushion"/modify the bezier defining it. I get how it's supposed to feel 'high end' but it's nonsensical in context and just gets in my way, even if it's in a tiny way.

ArchAndStarch•4 days ago

Check out https://github.com/joshuarli/iss !

PhiSchle•3 days ago

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...)

zlies•4 days ago

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

_andyg_•4 days ago

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.

braebo•3 days ago

Same but it’s certainly too slow.

gejose•3 days ago

⬆ Huge upvote for this find as I've been looking for a way to do this recently.

I tried the yabai + skhd recently, but I didn't like that I had to disable System Integrity Protection.

masijo•3 days ago

I thought I was the only one that noticed this and it was driving me insane. Can’t believe the experience is so sluggish, makes me miss KDE so much which is ridiculous.

__mharrison__•3 days ago

Kudos for the crazy hack (fast swipe). I'm in the aerospace crowd...

itubaj•3 days ago

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...

spiderice•3 days ago

I still miss the grid spaces that got removed in Lion.

al_borland•4 days ago

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.

nu11ptr•3 days ago

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.

coreyh14444•3 days ago

You can get instant switching in Windows 11 natively. I forget the exact setting but mine is instant. ctrl+super+right is just a few milliseconds.

Aaronstotle•4 days ago

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.

jzer0cool•3 days ago

Slightly off topic, how does one learn to start customizing their mac like this - 1 simple example for any customizing. Thanks!

4jck•3 days ago

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

randomeel•3 days ago

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.

__m•3 days ago

I use it without sip disabled + kanata. I think aerospace has an i3 preset config

KaiserPro•4 days ago

There used to be a commanline switch that if you used command left/right to switch it was almost instant. I'm not sure if thats still a thing

nkzd•4 days ago

Genuine question - why do people even use spaces? Why is it better than just CMD+Tab or CMD+Tilde until you arrive at the window you want?

wlesieutre•4 days ago

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.

ciaran93•3 days ago

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.

mrkpdl•4 days ago

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.

traderj0e•3 days ago

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.

rwc•4 days ago

Just installed and I have to say, works exactly as promised. This is a huge quality of life upgrade, thank you for sharing it Paul.

IOT_Apprentice•4 days ago

A lifetime license for BetterTouchTool with ALL its features is $25. The time the author spent on this is well over that amount.

traderj0e•3 days ago

Apparently the "natural scrolling" option also reverses the swipe gestures for space switching, haha

MaxMonteil•3 days ago

Thank you so much for sharing!!

This has bothered me ever since I switched to a mac from i3wm.

I wish you and your loved ones all the best <3

juggy69•3 days ago

I can't figure out how to install this. After doing ./build.sh what do I do next??

haunter•3 days ago

They just released a binary so no more source compilation is needed

https://github.com/jurplel/InstantSpaceSwitcher/releases/lat...

ardline•3 days ago

This is the kind of thing that looks simple until you're three layers deep in edge cases.

ralphc•4 days ago

Works on my Intel mac running Sonoma 14.8.2. I use Omakub on my Linux machine and missed this when on my mac.

airstrike•4 days ago

I wonder how this compares to Aerospace, which I use daily but ultimately has felt a bit janky and slow

revv00•3 days ago

It doesn't work macbook pro(Intel Sonoma 14.4.1), any thoughts? app icon is a forbidden icon.

toddmorey•4 days ago

> it works by simulating a trackpad swipe with a large amount of velocity

Damn, that's rather clever.

ibejoeb•3 days ago

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.

traderj0e•3 days ago

It's also hilarious that it works this way

krackers•3 days ago

I'm surprised others didn't pick it up sooner https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36938663

theultdev•4 days ago

This is beyond stupid for macbook using trackpad gestures.

I can understand for mouse/kbd input though.

walthamstow•4 days ago

I never run more than one space and instead switch between windows with the app Alt Tab

satvikpendem•4 days ago

I do both, Alt-Tab works well for spaces as well since it can discriminate which window is in which space.

willempienaar•3 days ago

Yes. Alt-tab makes MacOS actually usable

revv00•3 days ago

Not a space user, command+tab solve most of my problem. But will give it a try.

atombender•2 days ago

This is great, I've been annoyed by this since forever.

But I note with disappointment that is quite buggy:

- For apps that are set to appear on every space, they sometimes don't accept focus after switching to another space. Probably a macOS bug. Looks like some other window is receiving focus instead, and the front window isn't properly activated.

- The animation isn't completely gone. macOS will animate the switching when you use Cmd+Tab to switch to an app that is in a different space.

righthand•3 days ago

Wobbly Windows in KDE is the only acceptable animation.

isege•4 days ago

Christmas has come early! Thank you for sharing this

obvi8•3 days ago

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.

anonymous344•3 days ago

always the same, no features, no freedom and stealing the best ideas from small developers -apple

kewlzeeroe•3 days ago

why would you ever suggest disabling sip to "power users" seems bananas in this day and age.

houseofmvps•4 days ago

Great one. Thank you for sharing this.

kewlzeeroe•3 days ago

why would you post anything that has to disable sip... seems silly in this day and age.

mixtureoftakes•4 days ago

this was SO annoying. thank you.

Truly baffling how apple haven't done this before

nba456_•3 days ago

Awesome. Thank you!

theobr•3 days ago

This changed my life

throwatdem12311•4 days ago

Can’t say that the sliding animation has ever been the bottleneck to my productivity.

jgauth•4 days ago

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.

qudat•4 days ago

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

mikeweiss•3 days ago

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.

joeevans1000•3 days ago

THANK YOU!!!!

virtualritz•3 days ago

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.

thenthenthen•3 days ago

Nice hack! Tldr: ‘instant’ space switching is achieved by simulating a trackpad swipe with insane velocity. Lol!

jiehong•4 days ago

Outstanding!

user3939382•4 days ago

I’ve used TotalSpaces for this in the past, though Apple has essentially ruined the ability to make these tools successful with their SIP bullshit

veber-alex•4 days ago

Wow, works great.

I used to use yabai for this but I can't disable SIP anymore on a work laptop.

Also, stuff like this is why I really hate macOS sometimes.

hk1337•4 days ago

meh, i like the animation. I normally use it with the trackpad so the swiping back and forth makes it feel more natural if there's animation.

tomi_dev•4 days ago

Curious — what was the hardest part to get right here? Was it performance or handling edge cases?

mrkpdl•3 days ago

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.

crooked-v•3 days ago

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.

zahma•3 days ago

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.

tmarice•3 days ago

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.