[HN Gopher] Native Instant Space Switching on macOS
___________________________________________________________________
Native Instant Space Switching on macOS
Author : PaulHoule
Score : 619 points
Date : 2026-04-09 19:48 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (arhan.sh)
(TXT) w3m dump (arhan.sh)
| adamnemecek wrote:
| 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.
| ubercore wrote:
| 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.
| probabletrain wrote:
| 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.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| 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.
| guessmyname wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I can prove everyone doesn't love hyberbole because I have
| found a counterexample, but I cannot prove everyone doesn't
| use Rectangle.app.
| fellowniusmonk wrote:
| 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.
| airstrike wrote:
| 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
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| 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.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _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.
| pahomov wrote:
| Contexts app is perfect for win-like alt-tabbing
| https://contexts.co/
| dmoose wrote:
| 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.
| Fraterkes wrote:
| 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.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| it just blends into the background for me personally, i found
| it annoying a little when i swapped from multiple monitors to
| one
| rwc wrote:
| Now do it 100x every day and see if it gets old :)
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| 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.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| > 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.
| ray__ wrote:
| 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.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Why not use a macOS i3-like window manager like yabai or
| komorebi (paid)?
| lynndotpy wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| You can turn tiling off
|
| `yabai -m rule --add app=".*" manage=off`
| FireBeyond wrote:
| > 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.
| phren0logy wrote:
| Having been ruined by Linux options like Hyperland and Niri, I'm
| digging my early foray into OmniWM -
| https://github.com/BarutSRB/OmniWM
| sgloutnikov wrote:
| Same boat and whoa this looks nice! Will give it a try thank
| you!
| yuters wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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?!
| ivanjermakov wrote:
| Sort of. With proper workspaces you land directly on the full
| screen program with a single hotkey. No cmd-tab switching
| needed.
| grantith wrote:
| You don't technically need workspaces for this with
| app/window hotkey assignments via raycast or hammerspoon,
| for example.
| prewett wrote:
| 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.)
| sgloutnikov wrote:
| 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
| coldpie wrote:
| > 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.
| jzer0cool wrote:
| Using built-in tooling (settings) could anyone share your
| ways to get to app + switch to correct window.
| walthamstow wrote:
| I never run more than one space and instead switch between
| windows with the app Alt Tab
| satvikpendem wrote:
| I do both, Alt-Tab works well for spaces as well since it can
| discriminate which window is in which space.
| willempienaar wrote:
| Yes. Alt-tab makes MacOS actually usable
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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".)
| rwc wrote:
| 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.
| hk1337 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Curious -- what was the hardest part to get right here? Was it
| performance or handling edge cases?
| aequitas wrote:
| 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.
| vict7 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| For #1, holding the option key makes the x immediately appear
| on all of the spaces.
| sparqlittlestar wrote:
| Press Option to immediately show the close button
| aequitas wrote:
| 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.
| jhogendorn wrote:
| 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.
| throwatdem12311 wrote:
| Can't say that the sliding animation has ever been the bottleneck
| to my productivity.
| jgauth wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| benji-york wrote:
| 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.
| nicoburns wrote:
| 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_ wrote:
| 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 Expose? From my POV it works the same as it always has.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| 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_ wrote:
| 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
| Expose 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
| Expose? I'm just not seeing it.
| tptacek wrote:
| God damnit I didn't know until 15 seconds ago that the Space-
| switching animation in macOS was annoying. Thanks a lot!
| el_benhameen wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > _our input devices remain focused on the previous space
| until the animation fully completes_
|
| This strikes me as the fuckup more than anything else.
| qudat wrote:
| It's insane and the worst part about Mac OS
| veber-alex wrote:
| 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.
| SamuelAdams wrote:
| My favorite MacOS update was when the removed the need
| for Rectangle, Mos, and Unnatural ScrollWheels.
|
| /s
| coldtea wrote:
| > _3 people from my team recently switched to macOS and
| they never owned a mac before and they are all
| complaining about window management._
|
| For legit reasons? Because many switchers complain for
| stupid reasons, like the macOS distinction between apps
| and windows.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Mac power user 25+ years.
|
| Yes, it's complete shit
| mort96 wrote:
| Complaining about the distinction between apps and
| windows isn't a "stupid reason" to complain though.
|
| Say I use Slack, Teams and Outlook. If I use their
| Electron versions, I switch between them with cmd+tab. If
| I use them in separate browser windows, I switch between
| them by using cmd+tab to switch to Firefox, then cmd+` to
| cycle through windows until I find the one I want. That's
| weird; how you switch between these three apps depend on
| the technical details on how you opened them? Why?
|
| Say I have neovim, the mutt email client, and a shell
| open. These are three separate apps, but because they
| happen to run in a terminal emulator, I still have to
| cmd+tab to the terminal emulator, then cmd+` to cycle
| between them. They're semantically different applications
| in dedicated windows, but technical implementation
| details mean they belong to what macOS considers "the
| same app", just like the "apps in Firefox windows"
| example above.
|
| It wouldn't be so bad if the cmd+` "cycle between windows
| in the app" feature worked well. But it doesn't. Unlike
| cmd+tab, it doesn't show a bar which you get to select
| from, it just instantly re-orders your windows; and it's
| impossible to select a window in another workspace. That
| means, if I have Slack open in Firefox in workspace 1 and
| Outlook open in Chrome in workspace 2, I can switch
| between Slack and Outlook with cmd+tab, but if I Slack
| open in Firefox in workspace 1 and Outlook open in
| Firefox in workspace 2, there is no way to switch between
| Slack and Outlook. That's pretty bad.
| veber-alex wrote:
| I would also add to this that in order to open two
| instances of an app the app explicitly needs to support
| this. For example, you can't open 2 instances of
| Calculator.app side by side.
|
| This is really annoying.
| coldtea wrote:
| Yeah, I always want 2 calculator apps when I'm speed
| calculating... what?
| mort96 wrote:
| You may want to see the result of one calculation while
| doing another calculation?
| igregoryca wrote:
| The (shift+)cmd+` order also resets to match the window
| z-order whenever you switch apps. So if the order is
| windows A, B, C, then you select window B, cmd+tab away,
| then cmd+tab back, the order will now be B, A, C.
|
| I've developed an intuitive understanding of this, but I
| had to experiment just now to describe the behavior
| precisely. And my intuition is still wrong sometimes
| (like if the app has windows on multiple monitors, it's
| hard to predict the z-order).
|
| > if I Slack open in Firefox in workspace 1 and Outlook
| open in Firefox in workspace 2, there is no way to switch
| between Slack and Outlook
|
| My local maximum is to never use workspaces - just
| cmd+tab, cmd+`, and sometimes cmd+h to reduce screen
| clutter.
| lossyalgo wrote:
| Have your teammates also discovered how macOS handles
| copy/pasting a folder when the destination folder already
| exists? How macOS just deletes the entire contents of the
| destination folder, instead of merging? I remember
| discovering that for the first time :(
| mvkel wrote:
| This is true in iOS, too. Taps are ignored until any
| animation completes. Must be deep in the code!
| klausa wrote:
| 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.
| jurplel wrote:
| I have noticed this bug since... I want to say High Sierra?
| It was the inspiration behind this project.
| duskdozer wrote:
| 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
| airstrike wrote:
| I wonder how this compares to Aerospace, which I use daily but
| ultimately has felt a bit janky and slow
| rendx wrote:
| 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)).
| gechr wrote:
| 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
| ralphc wrote:
| Works on my Intel mac running Sonoma 14.8.2. I use Omakub on my
| Linux machine and missed this when on my mac.
| jiehong wrote:
| Outstanding!
| xz18r wrote:
| 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
| tytho wrote:
| 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).
| nathanwh wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| lolive wrote:
| When exactly do you need floating windows?
|
| - a happy ion2/i3 user since forever -
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| 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.
| wlonkly wrote:
| 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"]
| tcoff91 wrote:
| Aerospace is incredible.
| supersrdjan wrote:
| 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
| TMschar wrote:
| Another happy Aerospace user here!
| TMschar wrote:
| Also paired it with sketchybar!
| imgyuri wrote:
| for ghostty users check out
| https://ghostty.org/docs/help/macos-tiling-wms
| Wilder7977 wrote:
| 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.
| alper wrote:
| 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.
| charles_f wrote:
| 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.
| Aaronstotle wrote:
| 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.
| Cider9986 wrote:
| 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
| bananadonkey wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| mort96 wrote:
| 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.
| veber-alex wrote:
| 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.
| IOT_Apprentice wrote:
| A lifetime license for BetterTouchTool with ALL its features is
| $25. The time the author spent on this is well over that amount.
| aylmao wrote:
| 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
| tranceylc wrote:
| 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
| veber-alex wrote:
| This is such an insane bug to still have around all these
| years.
|
| Are apple engineers not using macOS?
| amelius wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised. Their 3D solid modeling is done on
| Windows, so why not their electronics.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 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.
| harrall wrote:
| 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.
| hirvi74 wrote:
| 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.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| This is exactly my thought 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
| alsetmusic wrote:
| There's a windowing bug that was introduced in 2009 that
| I'm confident will persist until MacOS has another
| MacOSX-style transition to something entirely new. They
| need someone who cares about fit&finish more than
| features driving the ship. That's not what gets promoted
| to the top, unfortunately.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| I'd be more than happy to spend a year polishing macOS
| and iOS for that matter
| whstl wrote:
| 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.
|
| So YMMV.
| drob518 wrote:
| I've learned over the years that most people have poor
| taste in UX. Even some UX designers and supposed
| "experts."
| drob518 wrote:
| 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.
| naikrovek wrote:
| Well, the UI leader behind Liquid Glass is no longer with
| the company, replaced by a long time Apple employee known
| for his eye for detail.
|
| I do t think Liquid Glass is going to go away soon, Apple
| doesn't seem to reverse itself ever, but I do expect
| Liquid Glass to become better over time. We'll see what
| WWDC brings on that front I guess.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| My take on it is that in my own work I really like
| transparency effects but it is always a chore to tune up
| the foregrounds, backgrounds and alpha blending to keep
| everything legible. If you control all the content it is
| one thing, but for a general-purpose OS where the content
| is supplied by the user and applications you have to dial
| the intensity way back.
|
| When I first saw the prototype images I thought they were
| really cool and it was a bold idea though people on this
| site were complaining about it already for the
| predictable reasons.
|
| When it came out I was thinking that they dealt with the
| legibility of the content by dialing down the legibility
| of the design -- like it looks like "anti-anti-aliasing"
| more than it looks like "bold transparent vision"
|
| One reason I don't think I read it as "refraction" is
| that one of my tells for refraction is chromatic
| aberration and without that it doesn't seem real to me. I
| think it would triple the texture lookup rate (at least)
| and make content legibility worse and I think you would
| see a lot of people say it is was an ugly gimmick.
| drob518 wrote:
| Technically, I'm awed by it. Very cool visually. It's
| just when you go to use it that it all falls apart. As
| you say, they can't control the content it's flying over,
| and thus sometimes it does bad things. But also they
| rearranged navigation and some other things. I try to
| keep from rejecting new things just because they are new,
| but there were some serious usability gaffes in both iOS
| and iPadOS. Interestingly, macOS doesn't have the same
| issues and I'm actually somewhat ambivalent about it.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| > Apple doesn't seem to reverse itself ever
|
| I agree, but also they broke that rule very recently when
| they lowered the price of a display and issued refunds
| one month after intro. The VESA price dropped $400. I
| learned about it from Accidental Tech Podcast.
|
| https://www.apple.com/us-edu/shop/buy-mac/studio-display-
| xdr
| drob518 wrote:
| And they did give up on the butterfly keyboard and the
| touch bar. So, there's hope.
| wlonkly wrote:
| And they bought NeXT!
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| 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.
| plufz wrote:
| 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.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Apple had a few near death experiences and might not have
| survived.
|
| One of those early near death experiences might have been
| Jobs fault (going at the Apple /// and the Mac when, in
| retrospect, the Apple ][ could have been evolved more
| aggressively) but he helped bring it back from the brink
| later on.
|
| Android deserves a lot of credit for the success of iOS
| in that a zombie mobile OS that doesn't have to be
| profitable has displaced a competitive mobile OS. A
| similar kind of fragmentation has bedeviled the Windows
| (and Linux) PC as well as (from the viewpoint of Windows)
| distractions such as Azure (good business) and XBOX (bad
| business.)
|
| Intel deserves a lot of credit for the success of Apple
| too because for 15 years Intel has had no strategy to
| translate architectural improvements to experienced
| performance for client PCs. The way they've gone about
| SIMD is an absolute disaster, like by the time we can use
| AVX-512 in mainstream software everybody will have moved
| on to ARM. Charlie Demerjian would talk your ear off
| about how the tech press has been uncritical about their
| hyperscaler/HPC patter, never reminding you that client
| PCs are still the bread and butter of their business --
| pander to the likes of Amazon and they will use any cost
| savings they get to invest in ARM. It's suicide.
| godelski wrote:
| > 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
| mort96 wrote:
| It gets through because Cook has no eye for design or
| usability (he's a supply chain guy) and Alan Dye, who
| Cook put in charge of software design, wanted it that
| way. I'm sure there are designers who hated it, but they
| don't have the final say.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| > Maybe Apple engineers are afraid to push back on
| management?
|
| I can tell you with confidence that this isn't the issue.
| HIG (Human Interface Guidelines: a design spec that
| became a department / org) overrides them.
| brantonb wrote:
| This isn't unique to Apple. The Windows developers were
| very vocal about a full screen start menu in Windows 8
| being a bad change. We were told that we weren't allowed
| to talk about it anymore on the large mailing list about
| the product. The decision had been made and complaints
| would no longer be read or responded to.
| aylmao wrote:
| Apple is hurt by being so centralized Cupertino IMO. A
| company that big in city that small and frankly, boring,
| isn't going to have the best hiring pool.
|
| I know plenty of very talented people who simply won't
| apply to Apple. They don't want to live in Cupertino or
| have to commute 2+ hours each day to go to work.
|
| Steve Jobs was a middle-class guy trying to find his
| place in the world; the kind to travel India to to meet
| Neem Karoli Baba, shaved head, barefoot, wearing kurtas
| [1]. 50 years later, who grows up in Cupertino? It's no
| longer "middle-class". I'm sure Cupertino produces some
| excellent talent that did great at some top university,
| but I'm also sure it's not the kind that rocks the boat,
| or the kind that will push a "dumb decision" out of
| principle at work and get fired, like Jobs did back in
| 1985.
|
| When I think Cupertino, the city, I don't think vibrancy
| of the built environment, diversity of professions, or
| wealth of ideas. I think comfort, complacency and quiet.
| The type of place that repels the kind of people who want
| to fight in the trenches, and slowly milds the fight out
| of those who do move there.
|
| I can only assume Apple, like a lot of the Bay at this
| point, survives from imported talent. The kind that is
| hungry enough to move across the country, or across the
| globe, to achieve something. But if you're in demand, why
| would you want to work in Cupertino and not San
| Francisco? Or better yet New York, Shenzhen, London,
| Tokyo, Shanghai, Paris, etc. Money only motivates people
| so much, and people who are in it for the money don't
| stand up for or against things in the same way.
|
| [1]: https://medium.com/macoclock/how-much-did-coming-to-
| india-co...
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I think a lot of Bay Area companies don't come to their
| full potential because of their location. I think Apple
| does so well though that I couldn't tell them to change
| anything,
|
| They are singular in a lot of ways. I was working with a
| business development guy on something that could have
| been "like Palantir but 10x potential TAM" and we seemed
| to have a knack for getting people to tell us more than
| they should have. Like instead of breaking up we should
| have gone into industrial espionage but I've seen just
| enough of that world to know better.
|
| We heard from all sorts of places where "people never
| talk" but _never_ Apple.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| > 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.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It's not meant to be an insult, I have a phone in my
| pocket with one of those chips. back when I was using
| Android I was like "why do people get so excited about
| apps?" but the iPhone experience is all different. They
| are "rejects" because a lot of them have a busted core
| which can be fused off.
|
| If there's a problem w/ the Neo in it's current
| incarnation is that are going to run out of those chips
| and find something else. It takes an advantage of the
| opportunity and might be the beginning of a new market
| segment for Mac which will hold PC and Chromebooks
| accountable.
|
| (Funny a pink netbook served me really well back in the
| day! I remember using one to log ham radio contacts from
| a mountaintop near San Luis Obispo into a sqlite database
| and then using it as the best ever car computer in the
| passenger seat of a car with Microsoft Streets & Trips
| and a music player)
| wlonkly wrote:
| No, it's the chips that could've been used in those
| flagship phones, but that were rejected. Rejection isn't
| ideological here, it's the QA process.
| lynguist wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| fizwidget wrote:
| In my experience iOS 26.4 did largely fix it btw. Update if
| you haven't already.
| ryanmcbride wrote:
| 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.
| niij wrote:
| But then you'd have to upgrade past 18, meaning the
| liquid glass abomination.
| JoeBOFH wrote:
| Most of my issues were fixed when I disabled swipe to type.
| Not all, but most.
| ryanmcbride wrote:
| 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.
| u_fucking_dork wrote:
| 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.
| ryanmcbride wrote:
| okay.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| 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.
| devilbunny wrote:
| If you had ever used Swype on Android (it was only
| briefly on iOS, and wasn't as good as the Android version
| yet), you would understand how good keyboards could be
| 10-12 years ago. Perfect precise cursor placement. Cut,
| copy, paste, and select shortcuts. It was not perfect,
| but it was rapidly getting there.
|
| Microsoft bought and killed it without, apparently,
| learning from it. Maybe there was a good reason why, but
| I've never seen one.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| No it doesn't.
|
| It did work fine before. But I had to swipe 3 times to
| get "fine" instead of "going" just now
| yard2010 wrote:
| This is misinformation, please provide sources to your
| claims. The iOS keyboard degraded in the latest versiond.
|
| https://www.macworld.com/article/2952872/heres-proof-
| that-th...
| mschulze wrote:
| Nice strawman, and unnecessary attack. I'm using iPhones
| since the 3GS, and from time to time type on an Android
| and the keyboard on iOS _sucks_. As someone else wrote, I
| am loathing to chat with someone on the phone and rather
| switch to my laptop.
| kcrwfrd_ wrote:
| In case anyone else is going crazy trying to find this
| setting, it's called _slide to type_
| Barbing wrote:
| If Tim used speech to text we'd be at least testing SotA
| local voice models in the iOS betas
| ryanmcbride wrote:
| Starting to wonder what he DOES use. I guess just the
| cameras since they seem to be the only things that
| change.
| llbbdd wrote:
| He's a gazillionaire, he has people to interact with
| phones for him
| testing22321 wrote:
| 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.
| kinematikk wrote:
| Whats the alternative? Android not, because it's
| absolutely not perfectly good
| vvillena wrote:
| The behavior of the iOS keyboard also showcases how there
| must not be many decision-making people who communicate in
| multiple languages.
| jurplel wrote:
| This, along with circle to search (for translating, mainly)
| are the current main things pushing me to stay on Android.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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!!!
| juujian wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| and set it to 60hz instead of 120. And install the tool
| that the article links to.
| bschwindHN wrote:
| 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.
| theredleft wrote:
| we are a certain type of people here, aren't we?
| presbyterian wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| abustamam wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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!
| mort96 wrote:
| 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/works
| pace_swi.... Apologies for the choppy recording, QuickTime
| screen recording is not very good; but it gets the point
| across.
| fifafu wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Nevermark wrote:
| 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.
| user3939382 wrote:
| 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
| modeless wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| toddmorey wrote:
| > it works by simulating a trackpad swipe with a large amount of
| velocity
|
| Damn, that's rather clever.
| traderj0e wrote:
| It's also hilarious that it works this way
| ibejoeb wrote:
| 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.
| krackers wrote:
| I'm surprised others didn't pick it up sooner
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36938663
| theultdev wrote:
| This is beyond stupid for macbook using trackpad gestures.
|
| I can understand for mouse/kbd input though.
| mintplant wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Turn off "Animation Effects" in Settings and it will be
| instantaneous.
| lll-o-lll wrote:
| And VsCode will not display dark mode correctly.
| AaronFriel wrote:
| Oh that's a surprising interaction. I use dark mode themes,
| is there something I haven't noticed?
| lll-o-lll wrote:
| 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.
| nixosbestos wrote:
| Pretty sure that's from another setting in the same panel
| KaiserPro wrote:
| 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
| isege wrote:
| Christmas has come early! Thank you for sharing this
| houseofmvps wrote:
| Great one. Thank you for sharing this.
| al_borland wrote:
| 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.
| hmokiguess wrote:
| 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
| ArchAndStarch wrote:
| Check out https://github.com/joshuarli/iss !
| PhiSchle wrote:
| 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...)
| gryfft wrote:
| 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.
| flawn wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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!
| mixtureoftakes wrote:
| this was SO annoying. thank you.
|
| Truly baffling how apple haven't done this before
| IOT_Apprentice wrote:
| BetterTouchTool is $25 for a lifetime license with upgrades.
| mixtureoftakes wrote:
| how can I do this with it?
| dcre wrote:
| It says it in the post: there's an action you can map to keys
| for "move right a space (no animation)".
| koch wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| tnightengale wrote:
| 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.
| taude wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.)
| Starmina wrote:
| 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.
| piskov wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Like I've said, on windows you have komorebi that does
| exactly that
| weakfish wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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"
| ericholscher wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| piskov wrote:
| In system settings for desktop and dock you may want to
| experiment with:
|
| 1. When switch into an application switch to a space with
| open Windows for the application.
|
| 2. Automatically rearrange space is based on most recent
| use.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Tried everything
|
| Nothing provides structure, and separation
|
| Ideally I'd just run 6 users in 6 spaces
|
| The whole cmdtab shouldn't show applications without
| windows nor als with no window in the current space
| interpol_p wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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
| thamer wrote:
| 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).
| tnightengale wrote:
| 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.
| nkzd wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 expose gestures are also much more usable than
| when everything is jumbled together.
| mrkpdl wrote:
| 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.
| ciaran93 wrote:
| 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.
| traderj0e wrote:
| 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.
| zlies wrote:
| 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_ wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Same but it's certainly too slow.
| mrkpdl wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| virtualritz wrote:
| 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.
| traderj0e wrote:
| Apparently the "natural scrolling" option also reverses the swipe
| gestures for space switching, haha
| ivanjermakov wrote:
| Amazing how much effort is needed from a billion dollar company
| to make a feature present in my 1kLOC window manager.
| gib444 wrote:
| 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...
| revv00 wrote:
| Not a space user, command+tab solve most of my problem. But will
| give it a try.
| bfirsh wrote:
| Here's a script to install and configure, in case it's helpful
| for anyone's dotfiles:
| https://github.com/bfirsh/dotfiles/blob/48eff70daa754216eff9...
| revv00 wrote:
| It doesn't work macbook pro(Intel Sonoma 14.4.1), any thoughts?
| app icon is a forbidden icon.
| MaxMonteil wrote:
| 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
| hirvi74 wrote:
| 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.
| itubaj wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I still miss the grid spaces that got removed in Lion.
| DDayMace wrote:
| 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!
| godelski wrote:
| 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
| eviks wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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).
| matwood wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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
| saagarjha wrote:
| 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.
| primaprashant wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Actually, that was just recently merged into
| InstantSpaceSwitcher!
| obvi8 wrote:
| 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.
| kewlzeeroe wrote:
| why would you post anything that has to disable sip... seems
| silly in this day and age.
| kewlzeeroe wrote:
| why would you ever suggest disabling sip to "power users" seems
| bananas in this day and age.
| isodev wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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
| righthand wrote:
| Wobbly Windows in KDE is the only acceptable animation.
| mikeweiss wrote:
| 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.
| keerthiko wrote:
| 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.
| nu11ptr wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| 4jck wrote:
| 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
| __m wrote:
| I use it without sip disabled + kanata. I think aerospace has
| an i3 preset config
| randomeel wrote:
| 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.
| __mharrison__ wrote:
| Kudos for the crazy hack (fast swipe). I'm in the aerospace
| crowd...
| skupig wrote:
| 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!
| buster wrote:
| 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.
| theobr wrote:
| This changed my life
| joeevans1000 wrote:
| THANK YOU!!!!
| joeevans1000 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Synthesizing a really fast swipe to remove the transition is
| absolutely genius.
| ardline wrote:
| This is the kind of thing that looks simple until you're three
| layers deep in edge cases.
| anonymous344 wrote:
| always the same, no features, no freedom and stealing the best
| ideas from small developers -apple
| mabedan wrote:
| 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
| aesopturtle wrote:
| 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.
| tern wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| +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 wrote:
| I would love that video.
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| 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.
| juggy69 wrote:
| I can't figure out how to install this. After doing ./build.sh
| what do I do next??
| haunter wrote:
| They just released a binary so no more source compilation is
| needed
|
| https://github.com/jurplel/InstantSpaceSwitcher/releases/lat...
| zahma wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| modernerd wrote:
| > 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
| dewey wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Nice, I use Raycast for this (with global shortcuts from
| Raycast settings): https://www.raycast.com/core-
| features/window-management
| submeta wrote:
| 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.
| modernerd wrote:
| 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.
| fifafu wrote:
| 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.
| jjcosgrove wrote:
| [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.
| gejose wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| albertjs wrote:
| 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!
| nba456_ wrote:
| Awesome. Thank you!
| thenthenthen wrote:
| Nice hack! Tldr: 'instant' space switching is achieved by
| simulating a trackpad swipe with insane velocity. Lol!
| jzer0cool wrote:
| Slightly off topic, how does one learn to start customizing their
| mac like this - 1 simple example for any customizing. Thanks!
| Eric_WVGG wrote:
| > 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.
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