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Show HN: FlashSpace – fast, open-source, macOS Spaces replacement

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Re: Show HN: FlashSpace – fast, open-source, macOS Spaces replacement

#51

Post by throwaway314155 »

wojciech-kulik wrote: post #20
matanrubin wrote: post #19

The biggest pain point with macOS spaces is how it handles multiple windows of the same app. It drives me crazy. What is FlashSpace’s approach for solving this?

Could you explain what you mean? The app only allows assigning the whole app to a specific workspace. So you can't have one window of the same app in workspace A and another in workspace B. It's done this way because it's the most efficient way so far, but of course I understand that sometimes people may want to have multiple windows in different workspaces. I'm going to investigate a possibility to manage apps on a…

Just echoing the others here. I get it in principle, but in practice I treat 2-3 separate windows of Firefox as their own "app".

Re: Show HN: FlashSpace – fast, open-source, macOS Spaces replacement

#52

Post by nicce »

CharlesW wrote: post #15
toddmorey wrote: post #6

I’ve tried a lot of tiling window managers & Spaces replacements and it’s hard to take over that central piece of the OS reliably. There’s always at least one of my critical apps that freaks out. What I want more than anything is just a terminal flag to turn off the dumb animations on the built-in Spaces.

> What I want more than anything is just a terminal flag to turn off the dumb animations on the built-in Spaces. You can turn on "Reduce Motion" to change it from a slide to a fast cross-fade.

> You can turn on "Reduce Motion" to change it from a slide to a fast cross-fade.

That is just an illusion. Time is the same. Instead, you need to add abstraction on top of CMD + Left/Right keybinds to get fast movement between spaces, for example.

Re: Show HN: FlashSpace – fast, open-source, macOS Spaces replacement

#53

Post by maroonblazer »

SebastianKra wrote: post #46
atombender wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP, but the way I use macOS Spaces is to differentiate between work and private. I use Chrome for both, so I have some Chrome windows in my work space, and some in my private space. I do similar things for other apps like iTerm. It's an important feature. I once tried having two different browsers for work/private, but it was a chore to manage which browser I opened links in, so I gave up. My biggest problem with…

Right click the app icon > options > Assign To > This Desktop Also noteworthy: assign to all desktops. I use this to keep my browser and messaging apps in all spaces.

That doesn't solve parent's (and my) problem.

I have collections of tabs in different windows and I assign those windows to different spaces. Every time I reboot Chrome all windows are assigned to whichever space is active when I launch Chrome.

I seem to recall that Chrome used to remember these assignments, so maybe it's not a macOS problem, but rather a Chrome problem...?

Re: Show HN: FlashSpace – fast, open-source, macOS Spaces replacement

#54

Post by maleldil »

fragmede wrote: post #50
adamredwoods wrote: post #48

I don't use VWS on OSX, because I'm faster without it. Flashspace looks like an improvement (faster), but I don't know if it's how I work. I may try it. The biggest complaint I have, is why doesn't alt-tab work smarter? Here's an example of using alt-tab and window management differently: https://justinnoel.dev/2020/12/22/macplus-software-demo-of-c...

https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app/

This is a good solution. It interacts weirdly with programs that use native tabs (e.g. each Ghostty tab shows up as a separate window), but other than that, coming from other OSs, it works as you'd expect.

I tried getting used to the "macOS way", but this is just better.

Re: Show HN: FlashSpace – fast, open-source, macOS Spaces replacement

#55

Post by donfotto »

This is much needed on mac os. But why? Back in the day, mac os was supposed to "just work", and linux was for weirdos who had too much time and customized everything. But now, it's the opposite. Vanilla flavor ubuntu just works out of the box. And mac os needs tons of third party customization. Same with external monitors, on mac one needs 3rd party software for properly scaling the UI on a 4k monitor. That's core OS functionality, not something one should need an extension for.

Re: Show HN: FlashSpace – fast, open-source, macOS Spaces replacement

#56

Post by whatever1 »

creativenolo wrote: post #47
whatever1 wrote: post #21

This is awesome. But Apple needs to get their act together. Window management, specially in multi monitor/ space setups is unbelievably bad. What is the purpose of the dock? It does not tell you what apps have windows visible, preview these windows or inform you where these windows are. Absolute waste of screen real estate. And to add to the injury they seized another 10% of the horizontal space for the even more use…

This stuff is so divisive. You can find seemingly a roughly equal number of people who passionately think the opposite on many of these very-different-from-windows UX choices. I’m one. The dock tells me what apps are running and available. There are other ways to find the windows, and running apps don’t need windows.

Every single running UI app needs a window. The ones that run in the background and do not need a full fledged window go in the menubar next to the clock.

Re: Show HN: FlashSpace – fast, open-source, macOS Spaces replacement

#57

Post by Tagbert »

escapecharacter wrote: post #38
whatever1 wrote: post #21

This is awesome. But Apple needs to get their act together. Window management, specially in multi monitor/ space setups is unbelievably bad. What is the purpose of the dock? It does not tell you what apps have windows visible, preview these windows or inform you where these windows are. Absolute waste of screen real estate. And to add to the injury they seized another 10% of the horizontal space for the even more use…

I’m noticing that every single time I wake my (recent) MacBook from sleep, it forgets it’s attached to external monitors for at least 10 seconds. So, a bunch of windows do this confusing jump around and I have to wait for them to settle before I started anything!

It depends on how long that external monitor takes to wake up and respond to the display connection to confirm that it is there. If the monitor is still active then that is almost instant.

Re: Show HN: FlashSpace – fast, open-source, macOS Spaces replacement

#58

Post by cosmic_cheese »

doubled112 wrote: post #35
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is that among Linux users, multimonitor is unusual. Even most Linux laptop users seem to prefer single monitor clamshell mode vs. keeping the laptop open as a secondary screen. There’s a fair number of Macbook users who do clamshell too but secondary-laptop-screen setups are much much more common in the Mac crowd.

At some point I realized I’d rather one large 4K screen to any multi monitor setup I ever had. I’m not sure if it’s a coping mechanism for using Linux desktops or not, but it does avoid a few issues. It also makes window management simpler in the sense I can just sprawl them out and still see everything. Kind of like moving your project from a small desk to a big kitchen table. I tend to have two workspaces. One for…

I’m not sure that a single large screen would work for me. The value in both separate physical monitors and virtual desktops is the ability to distribute windows across screens and desktops according to purpose. Size factors in here too; I think my cap for usability sits at about 32” (preferably at 6k), with anything larger than that making me likely to get lost at sea in an ocean of windows.

Re: Show HN: FlashSpace – fast, open-source, macOS Spaces replacement

#59

Post by Brajeshwar »

zuhsetaqi wrote: post #41
whatever1 wrote: post #21

This is awesome. But Apple needs to get their act together. Window management, specially in multi monitor/ space setups is unbelievably bad. What is the purpose of the dock? It does not tell you what apps have windows visible, preview these windows or inform you where these windows are. Absolute waste of screen real estate. And to add to the injury they seized another 10% of the horizontal space for the even more use…

> What is the purpose of the dock? It’s an app launcher. Since I only open app with Spotlight/Alfred, my dock auto hides and doesn’t waste any real estate. The stage manager in my opinion should have been iPad only. But if you ignore the button in the control center it’s easy to forget that it even exists.

This is also what I do. The auto-hidden Dock is my way to check for Open apps (at times). Otherwise, I still do Alfred/Spotlight to go to an App.
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