alt Hacker NewsNative Instant Space Switching on macOS
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I think Apple is making a really fatal flaw. Tbh Microsoft is doing it too.
Design good interfaces, with sane defaults but do not handcuff power users!!!
I often hear people say no one should care because there aren't many power users. They're a small portion, but that's absurd framing. They matter a lot because they're the ones that push your design language, develop new ideas, influence the general community, build new programs, find your bugs, and all of that. Apple and Microsoft are closing the ecosystems to get more control not only to exploit the users more (scrape their data) but to reduce bugs and things. But more and more people are trying these random programs because they can't figure out how to do things the right way. It's exactly why people are getting more frustrated with computers. The general public still doesn't care about data harvesting but they do care that the restrictions are handcuffing them now.
Funny enough this is also why Linux is becoming more popular. You've always had complete control but in the last 5 years the barrier to entry has plummeted. It's still not right for the average joe but it's on its way and a few more specialty distros are already there (e.g. steamos). The irony is Apple had the right idea before, even if not as modifiable as Linux, it used to be easier. But now it's more like a power trip. Consolidating control because they don't know what else to do
I 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)
> 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.
God damnit I didn't know until 15 seconds ago that the Space-switching animation in macOS was annoying. Thanks a lot!
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
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.
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.
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.
Having been ruined by Linux options like Hyperland and Niri, I’m digging my early foray into OmniWM - https://github.com/BarutSRB/OmniWM
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.
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.
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!
Here's a script to install and configure, in case it's helpful for anyone's dotfiles: https://github.com/bfirsh/dotfiles/blob/48eff70daa754216eff9...
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.
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.
[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.
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.
> 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
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.
Is there a tool which eliminates the animation, also when switching between apps with cmd+tab? I almost never use ctrl+→, I just know what application I want to switch to.
All these apps that I tried only fix the ctrl+→, but not application switching
I'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!
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.
Slightly off topic, how does one learn to start customizing their mac like this - 1 simple example for any customizing. Thanks!
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!
Amazing how much effort is needed from a billion dollar company to make a feature present in my 1kLOC window manager.
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.
⬆ 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.
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.
This is one of those classic examples of software feeling ‘heavy’ for reasons that have nothing to do with hardware limits. People often talk about performance in terms of benchmarks, but interface latency on routine actions probably matters more to happiness than a lot of headline metrics. Nice work.
The animation has bugged me for years! Thanks to the blog post, I found out that BetterTouchTool - which I am already using - has this feature since a couple of versions and now I could enable it. Wasn't aware of that, sometimes the solution is so easy.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Synthesizing a really fast swipe to remove the transition is absolutely genius.
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
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)).
Kudos for the crazy hack (fast swipe). I'm in the aerospace crowd...
> 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.
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.
The thing that most bothers me is that there seems to not exist a good solution for spaces that allows a grid set of spaces, like the one you can configure on Linux Gnome DE. That thing was so useful...
Honestly, this animation in one of the best things about spaces in macOS. I use the four finger gesture to switch spaces all the time and it make the spaces feature so much more natural than all other window managers I’ve used before
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
I can't figure out how to install this. After doing ./build.sh what do I do next??
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.
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
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.
This is the kind of thing that looks simple until you're three layers deep in edge cases.
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