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Native Instant Space Switching on macOS
251–260 of 341 posts
Re: Native Instant Space Switching on macOS
#252I 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…
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.
Re: Native Instant Space Switching on macOS
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think Apple's self-image of being the epitome of design actually acts against them. Leads to monstrosities like Liquid Glass kinda vandalizing random parts of the UI in small ways that I intuitively read as "they are anti-anti-aliasing" not "they added cool refraction effects." It used to be you'd see something in a well-chosen color, now it is just a muddy kind of greyish brownish whatever. I'd like to see them ma…
> I think Apple's self-image of being the epitome of design actually acts against them. Leads to monstrosities like Liquid Glass kinda vandalizing random parts of the UI I'm pretty confident many Apple employees have eyes, and thus are aware of how absurd Liquid Glass is (wtf, my iPhone capitalizes that but not a standalone i?!?!) So assuming everyone at Apple isn't deaf (it's all over public discourse), blind (it lo…
It gets through because Cook has no eye for design or usability (he's a supply chain guy) and Alan Dye, who Cook put in charge of software design, wanted it that way. I'm sure there are designers who hated it, but they don't have the final say.
Re: Native Instant Space Switching on macOS
#254I 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…
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.
The closest thing you can do on macOS is to turn on "reduced motion". This doesn't remove any animations, it just replaces them all with fade animations which take the same amount of time.
Re: Native Instant Space Switching on macOS
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
Window management on macOS is just trash. 3 people from my team recently switched to macOS and they never owned a mac before and they are all complaining about window management. Do you know how dumb it makes me feel to have to tell them they need to install third party apps just to make their system somewhat usable? it's insane.
> 3 people from my team recently switched to macOS and they never owned a mac before and they are all complaining about window management. For legit reasons? Because many switchers complain for stupid reasons, like the macOS distinction between apps and windows.
Complaining about the distinction between apps and windows isn't a "stupid reason" to complain though.
Say I use Slack, Teams and Outlook. If I use their Electron versions, I switch between them with cmd+tab. If I use them in separate browser windows, I switch between them by using cmd+tab to switch to Firefox, then cmd+` to cycle through windows until I find the one I want. That's weird; how you switch between these three apps depend on the technical details on how you opened them? Why?
Say I have neovim, the mutt email client, and a shell open. These are three separate apps, but because they happen to run in a terminal emulator, I still have to cmd+tab to the terminal emulator, then cmd+` to cycle between them. They're semantically different applications in dedicated windows, but technical implementation details mean they belong to what macOS considers "the same app", just like the "apps in Firefox windows" example above.
It wouldn't be so bad if the cmd+` "cycle between windows in the app" feature worked well. But it doesn't. Unlike cmd+tab, it doesn't show a bar which you get to select from, it just instantly re-orders your windows; and it's impossible to select a window in another workspace. That means, if I have Slack open in Firefox in workspace 1 and Outlook open in Chrome in workspace 2, I can switch between Slack and Outlook with cmd+tab, but if I Slack open in Firefox in workspace 1 and Outlook open in Firefox in workspace 2, there is no way to switch between Slack and Outlook. That's pretty bad.
Re: Native Instant Space Switching on macOS
#256I 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
Oh yes, I've also suddenly had my workspace switcher turn black! Never happened before but it has started happening lately.
macOS has never been bug free, but it feels like they've really been working hard to introduce new bugs lately.
Re: Native Instant Space Switching on macOS
#257> 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 short…
I tried both. BetterTouchTool does support the no-animation left/right space actions, but on my machine InstantSpaceSwitcher felt a bit snappier for actually moving between spaces, so I kept that for my keyboard shortcuts for previous/next space and direct jumps to a specific desktop. I still use BTT for Mission Control / spaces preview. So for me the final setup is: InstantSpaceSwitcher for fast space switching, BTT…
that is weird, BTT's space switching should really be instant when used via keyboard shortcuts. (Developer of BTT here)
One advantage of BTT's current implementation is that it still allows you to move windows to the next/previous space while dragging them and simultaneously executing the "Move Left / Right a space" action. In that case there will be an animation but it will at least work.
Re: Native Instant Space Switching on macOS
#258⬆ 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.
Re: Native Instant Space Switching on macOS
#259I 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…
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 horribl…
> Sadly, solutions like BetterTouchTool and InstantSpaceSwitcher won't work for me because I prefer to use my trackpad to switch spaces.
One of BetterTouchTool's first features ~17 years ago was trackpad gesture customization, it is still one of the most important things you can do with BTT! ;-) You'd just need to assign the "Move Right a Space (without animation)" and "Move Left a Space (without animation)" actions to trackpad gestures in BTT.
Re: Native Instant Space Switching on macOS
#260I 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. [1] https://github.com/wojciech-kulik/FlashSpace
+1 for FlashSpace. I used to be an i3 user and MacOS workspace management drove me mad. For years we had TotalSpaces, but that is no longer being maintained. With FlashSpace I finally have a great setup. My solution has been binding a key Hyper+[a-z] for my applications. When used in conjuction with FlashSpace I get a usable setup. I also heavily rely on native MacOS binding Cmd+` (backtick) to cycle the currently fo…
I would love that video.