alt Hacker NewsI 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
Replies
This is such an insane bug to still have around all these years.
Are apple engineers not using macOS?
I noticed this immediately when I first used a 120Hz macbook in 2021. As a vanilla MacOS UI feature that I'm sure many people use, I can't believe it hasn't been fixed yet.
Don't know about customizability on MacOS but I've always been very accustomed to animations and recently I just turned them off on Android and Linux and I... Don't miss anything. Turned out they don't add anything other than an initial wow factor.
I also have a 120Hz Mac, and the animation is indeed slower in 120Hz mode. In my opinion, the animation crossed the line from "too slow but bearable" to "unbearable" with 120Hz. It is as you say; it's not really the animation itself that's the problem, but the delay from when I tell my machine "switch to this other workspace" until the focus switches to a window on that other workspace. The animation has this horrible ease-out effect where the last few centimeters take what feels like forever.
Getting a 120Hz Mac actually completely changed my whole macOS philosophy. I used to use spaces extremely heavily. I now almost don't use them at all, preferring window switching with cmd+tab instead.
The infuriating thing is that almost all discussion on this on the web just says "turn on reduced motion". Not only should that be unnecessary; it doesn't even fix the problem! Sure, there's no longer a sliding animation, but there's now a fade animation instead which takes just as long.
It's completely incomprehensible that Apple hasn't fixed this.
Sadly, solutions like BetterTouchTool and InstantSpaceSwitcher won't work for me because I prefer to use my trackpad to switch spaces.
EDIT: I actually recorded and compared the switching speeds a while ago: https://old.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/rfmg4e/workspace_swi.... Apologies for the choppy recording, QuickTime screen recording is not very good; but it gets the point across.
I have noticed this bug years before Apple started selling 120hz displays. I thought for sure they would fix it after that, but to my surprise it has persisted...
I think it must go back to High Sierra or Mojave at least.
I've been having the same problem, entering keystrokes in the wrong windows when changing spaces. I'm so glad to know it's not just me, it's the fact that I just a couple months ago bought a new MBP. Thank you!
I 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
we are a certain type of people here, aren't we?
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.