Discussion

Native Instant Space Switching on MacOS

adamnemecek: 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.

ray__: 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: Why not use a macOS i3-like window manager like yabai?

lynndotpy: 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.

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

rahimnathwani: Yes, and the app they're recommending emulates that swipe, but really really fast, so it looks instant. And you don't have to swipe 8 times to go from #1 to #9.

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

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

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

FireBeyond: > 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 involvedSystem 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.

nicoburns: 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.

gechr: Nice. I wrote a little menubar app and Space switching has been a thorn in my side, including going down the "Yabai integration" route. Will have to take a look at this and see if I can borrow some ideas!Shameless plug: https://github.com/gechr/WhichSpace

rendx: 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)).

airstrike: [delayed]

Cider9986: 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

Aaronstotle: 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.

cosmic_cheese: 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: 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.

xz18r: 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

modeless: 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, but the Snapdragon X2 Elite looks like a viable alternative. It's the only competitor with comparable single core performance. Unfortunately Linux support isn't really there yet, but hey M5 MacBooks don't support Linux well either.

reaperducer: 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.

theultdev: This is beyond stupid for macbook using trackpad gestures.I can understand for mouse/kbd input though.

toddmorey: > it works by simulating a trackpad swipe with a large amount of velocityDamn, that's rather clever.

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

KaiserPro: 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

aylmao: 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 I would at times 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: 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

al_borland: 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.

veber-alex: This is such an insane bug to still have around all this years.Are apple engineers not using macOS?

tytho: 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).