Native Instant Space Switching on macOS

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.

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

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?

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

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.

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

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

Awesome. Thank you!

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

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

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

Damn, that's rather clever.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Christmas has come early! Thank you for sharing this

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.

Great one. Thank you for sharing this.

This changed my life

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.

BetterTouchTool is $25 for a lifetime license with upgrades.

this was SO annoying. thank you.

Truly baffling how apple haven't done this before

THANK YOU!!!!

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

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

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

Wobbly Windows in KDE is the only acceptable animation.

You know Apple lost it and have become what Jobs most hated when the instructions to suppress an obvious UX flaw in macOS read like a registry tweaking hack for some atrocious UX in Windows, ca 2005.

I 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.

Outstanding!

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...

This is beyond stupid for macbook using trackpad gestures.

I can understand for mouse/kbd input though.

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.

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.

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

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

[dead]

[dead]

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

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.

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.