It is very good even though it's in early development. Issues are getting fixed almost as fast as I can find them. I have to use macOS sometimes for work and OmniWM made it bearable.

Same boat and whoa this looks nice! Will give it a try thank you!

You don't need to full screen anything to use macOS spaces for O(1) app-switching, instead of O(N) by pressing Cmd+Tab repeatedly to linearly scan your list of applications.

The rule is simple: one app per space, and Ctrl+{1,2,3…} switches to the corresponding space in O(1). For me space 1 is an IDE + terminal, 2 browser, 3 messaging, 4 bug tracker, 5–6 AI agents etc. It was fast to learn: get a DM, press ^3; to file a bug, press ^4 etc. I use this with the Rectangle app for window tiling, and this combination works great for me; I rarely ever use Cmd+Tab.

I also have a personal menubar app that's very similar to SpaceName, to quickly get the current ID when multiple spaces have a similar layout (e.g. terminal takes the left half, a browser the right half).

Yeah well, I'd like to see your face when you find out that each time you fire shortcat it makes one HTTP request, yikes.

if youre using a firefox based browser, slow fullscreen for media can be fixed by setting the full-screen-api.macos-native-full-screen flag to false in about:config

Hey, author here, and cool project! I spent some time comparing Yabai's scripting addition to InstantSpaces' scripting addition. They seem to be doing the exact same thing, but Yabai works while InstantSpaces doesn't, and I eventually gave up trying to figure out why.

Regardless, I still prefer InstantSpaceSwitcher because its implementation is simpler and it doesn't require disabling SIP. If you can get it working, however, I can edit my blog post to say so!

Actually, that was just recently merged into InstantSpaceSwitcher!

I use it without sip disabled + kanata. I think aerospace has an i3 preset config

They use a clean work Mac for just work.

It’s like having a dedicated space for a few apps and folders. No wonder they don’t care

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.

> I'm still impressed when switching between programs isn't stuttery

It is stuttery when you use the magic touchpad via Bluetooth, same applies to the cursor. It's very noticeable with slow movements.

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

I still miss the grid spaces that got removed in Lion.

> 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

System 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.

Agreed, that’s one of the things I miss most when using a Windows machine at work. Something about the animation makes my workspace feel bigger in a way that the Windows multiple desktop feature is just missing.

Technically Windows does have an animation when switching desktops with the trackpad, but it’s so jittery that it’s annoying. And the desktop image takes seconds to update, and only updates after completing the animation. To me this is one of those “death by 1000 missing bits of attention to detail” problems that plagues Microsoft/Windows.

Same but it’s certainly too slow.

Check out https://github.com/joshuarli/iss !

I can organize related windows by task, so if I have two things going on which both involve say a Finder window, a Safari window, and some other assorted things, I can switch between tasks as a group with one gesture instead of cmd-tab which will pull up both Safari windows or both Finder windows, and then maybe needing to cmd=` to switch to the correct one.

When I'm in the appropriate space with only those related windows, the exposé gestures are also much more usable than when everything is jumbled together.

Because it makes you have to think before moving. If I am on Chrome and want to go to my code editor, I have to press CMD+Tab, see what position the code editor is in and press CMD+Tab x times to go there.

If I uses spaces, I know exactly where my editor is, where my browser is, it is one key press away and it is always there. I use aerospace and I divide my spaces using Alt+ the qwerty keys. Q=chrome W=code editor E&R=programs open for what I am working aka Postman or Obsidian and T=MS Teams.

My dock on MacOS is always hidden because I don't need it and now I have more screen realestate.

For me, I use spaces constantly to help me organise/compartmentalise what I’m doing. It lets you group related windows, where command tab only brings you one window at a time.

One example would be if I’m working on a document that draws on others I have written. Put all three in a space and that piece of work is nicely organised.

When I have all my windows in one space I find it messy and stressful and it’s harder to find what I want.

Overall spaces are more compatible with the way I think than command tab.

I personally don't, even when I'm doing heavy multitasking on a 13" laptop. Only exception is if something needs to be full-screen.

It can make sense if you're keeping a lot of non-full-size windows on a larger screen and working on separate tasks that are in the same application, meaning cmd-tab won't help.

Try it on an ultrawide monitor. For me it's literally nauseating to leave it turned on, as in, it actively triggers motion sickness with a monitor that width.

This has been known for a long time lmao, I'm surprised others didn't pick it up sooner https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36938663

I'm a little afraid of the failure modes, frankly. Clever, but that seems like it would b likely to exercise some under-tested timing situations. I'm not familiar with that API, so take the hunch with a grain of salt.

It's also hilarious that it works this way

I've seen this sentiment often. For example, in a discussion about slow nvm load times: "Does adding 0.5s delay to opening your terminal really affect your productivity?"

I agree that these small things are not bottlenecks to my productivity. I can work just fine despite them. However there is some intangible effect they have on my mindset when I'm working. The more "snappy" my computer feels, the easier it is to enter a sort of flow state. Small bits of friction here and there add up.

Single monitor workflows — which are more ergonomic — make switching spaces a necessity. It might not impact productivity but it is annoying as hell switching around spaces a lot

As someone who never uses spaces or any window manager, what am I actually missing? What’s wrong with cmd tab and just switching between apps? Is this going to be some Kind of major epiphany?!

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.

In keeping with this, for the transition animation you can choose several options like a fade and a slide, you can turn them off completely (as this hack does for macOS). You can even set the speed of some transitions. I have it set to slide but faster than normal. So the sliding gives me a little spatial awareness of where I move within the grid, but it still feels snappy. All just by ticking some options. I love KDE <3

You don’t get it

Spaces are not for fullscreen but for basically virtual desktops i3 linux style

Here is superior user experience:

1. Install moom. Its keyboard windows arrangement is second to none. Its two-step tiling is a killer. Ie caps-a to show a popup with all the shortcuts, then “a” letter for vertical 1/3 of the screen. Or s for middle 2/3. Or q for top left third — you can assign any letter for any portion of the screen.

2. Use option1-6 to switch between desktops

3. For example alt-4 is a desktop where you have all on one screen (suppose you have 6k xdr like i do): safari, mail, messages, telegram, hey email, reeder

alt-3 is your productivity desktop where you have things, calendar, basecamp, notes, ia writer

alt-1 and 2 is for your main work like rider ide or what have you

Alt-5 for your remote stuff like remote desktop, servers, what have you

—

So with this you have a mental model of where everything is always and instant switching to it. Want to see your todos and notes? Alt-3. Want to see your browser and messaging? Alt-4. You get it.

Moom is better than tiling manager for screens like 6k 32” xdr.

Otherwise tiling managers are perfectly fine. For instance on windows I use komorebi

Similar I just use RayCast Hotkeys to bring mostly full-sized apps of my choice to the forefront and not worry about much. I'm also just optimizing around a small single screen setup these days for focusing on stuff.

option-cmd-o BOOM, outlook opt-cmd-g Bang, Ghostty opt-cmd-v POW, VSCode opt-cmd-s Boff, Slack etc etc...

ALSO: I learned this from some prior thread on something similar.

I agree that I miss when spaces could be on a grid in Snow Leopard instead of only in a straight line, but what is wrong with Exposé? From my POV it works the same as it always has.

I have been dealing with the same issue and thought I was going crazy that the setting which purports to fix this exact behavior simply doesn’t work?

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.

Why not use a macOS i3-like window manager like yabai or komorebi (paid)?

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

Spaces is what used to known in Linux as virtual desktops (maybe it still is), and that is how I think of it. Or as virtual monitors. Right now I have desktop one for local system iTerm2 and Firefox, desktop two for client 1 (terminals, IntelliJ IDEA), desktop three for client 2 (VirtualBox, terminals), desktop four for incidental stuff that needs a mostly empty desktop, and desktop five for Chrome (for things that need it), and GIMP and Inkscape (as needed). This way everything stays where I put it, including which windows over which other ones. So I can switch to D1 to look up some documentation on a function, then back to D2 to use that knowledge. Or on my personal laptop I can keep my coding project up one desktop and do the daily web surfing on another, and just switch desktops to have the coding project right where I left it.

(You do use a window manager, btw, it's the thing that puts the title bars on your windows and lets you move them around. On macOS it's integrated in, but on Linux you have to choose one. There are many, all of which have some failing. Except for sawfish, whose failing is that it is no longer maintained.)

> Also, Apple makes them dynamic now.

I don't understand why they do this at all; but at least it's still a single checkbox you can toggle off, FWIW.

(Desktop & Dock -> Mission Control -> "Automatically rearrange Spaces based on most recent use".)

I've tried KDE but unfortunately too much of it clashes with my preferences, even after spending quite a lot of time tinkering with its many config options. It's a nice project but I don't think it'll ever be for me, despite carrying features from older versions of macOS.

This is similar to how I use Spaces. I haven't hotkeyed desktops, but each one is designated for a particular task or theme. The concept extends further with a secondary display, with the primary monitors' spaces being assigned "main task" duty while the secondary displays' spaces get "aux task" duty — so e.g. IDEs and browser windows immediately relevant to the task at hand go on a main monitor desktop while secondary display desktops are used for things like chat, music, and documentation.

This is a core part of my workflow and is one of the reasons why I would have a difficult time using Windows as my primary OS: its virtual desktop support is far too weak in comparison. It can't even switch desktops independently per-display.

I'm really confused - I downloaded Moom because of this comment, but can't find a feature to switch Spaces. Am I missing something?

How does that compare to using Alt Tab? And I forget if you have to suffer through any animation at all when you do it that way

At least the setting does work in reducing the switching when you cmd-tab to an application with no open windows in the current space. But I think some of this annoying switching behaviour is application specific logic and they just didn't get it right with Safari, some other applications do get it right though.

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

Sort of. With proper workspaces you land directly on the full screen program with a single hotkey. No cmd-tab switching needed.

This is exactly what I do -- but I have space split up by persona (Personal, work 1, work 2, Play), and then each space is managed with Moom. Love it.

IIRC Expose is now called Mission Control (four finger swipe up on my system).

My problem with it is that it's useless if you got more than few windows open - the preview is just too small to actually see which window you are after (it's all padded for the looks). IMO if they actually used tiles, potentially grouped by app - it would be so much useful.

Yabai looks cool tho, but requires so much permissions and potentially disabling system integrity protection that IDK if it's a go for me.

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.

And VsCode will not display dark mode correctly.

I wouldn't be surprised. Their 3D solid modeling is done on Windows, so why not their electronics.

Personally, I think some animations can help add context to what is happening. For example, when using QuickLook, there is an animation when opening/closing QuickLook that zooms out from, and then back to the file location. If doing something with that file after the QL, that little visual clue helps find it faster and know where it opened from.

> our input devices remain focused on the previous space until the animation fully completes

This strikes me as the fuckup more than anything else.

You don't technically need workspaces for this with app/window hotkey assignments via raycast or hammerspoon, for example.

You will still run into shit when one application instance is used in two spaces

Finder, chromes, etc. it will cause automatic switching.

Also, cmd-tab doesn’t have a filtered mode for the active space

Cmd-~ actually works better when using stage manager, because it goed through all active windows across all apps

I don't have a Snow Leopard Mac in front of me to compare, but as far as I can tell, four finger swipe works the same way it always has. It's hard to find targets if you have dozens of windows open, yes, but I don't remember old Exposé being any better in that regard. I think one or two macOS releases had some kind of "Mission Control UI" in the bottom half of the screen when you did the swipe, but that's gone now and the entire screen is used for the tiles.

Can you explain more about what regressed since the old Exposé? I'm just not seeing it.

I was referring to their last line ("I will never be able to simultaneously experience the productivity of i3 and the necessary evil of MS Office/Illustrator on the same OS") not the linked article because the parent doesn't "think that this will solve spaces on MacOS" therefore I gave a suggestion that would.

Secondly I don't find anything that bad about why the article's author doesn't want to use yabai, I generally disable SIP anyway (because I want to install anything I want without restriction, even edit system files because that's necessary in some cases, as yabai does); and they just don't want to learn a new WM which is fine for them but isn't a valid reason for everyone to not use yabai.

You can turn tiling off

`yabai -m rule --add app=".*" manage=off`

Same here. My only complaint is I wish there was a way to make apps floating by default and then you would specify which ones you want tiled.

IME a lot of apps are easier to use in their default state. I really only use my web browser, text editor, and terminal in tiled mode.

This is true in iOS, too. Taps are ignored until any animation completes. Must be deep in the code!

It’s insane and the worst part about Mac OS

Oh that's a surprising interaction. I use dark mode themes, is there something I haven't noticed?

You got me thinking, and this seems to work for me. I didn't test if the order of these blocks matters.

    [[on-window-detected]]
       if.app-id = "com.github.wez.wezterm"
       run = ["layout tiling"]

    [[on-window-detected]]
       if.app-name-regex-substring = '.'
       run = ["layout floating"]

That's entirely app-level issue; the frameworks and the system itself is perfectly capable of handling this. [1]

It's just that for _most_ cases it's perfectly fine to make the users wait until the animations is finished, and handling users tapping multiple things in a quick succession can get annoying and unwieldy.

There are some apps when it's infuriating though, especially when they're quadruply badly engineered and _tie the internal logic state_ to the UI state.

As someone living in a country where I don't speak the local language, I swear at Google Translate engineers daily because I do a "swap the active pair of languages and then quickly launch the camera mode" combo _very_ frequently, and the selected pair of languages isn't actually updated _until the animation finishes_.

It's maddening. [2]

[1]: A quick demo: tap an app on a Springboard to open it, and very quickly swipe up from the bottom to hide it. You'll absolutely be able to interrupt the animation of it launching.

[2]: I'm actually sorta guessing that this is a workaround for a different bug they had; when if you tapped this quickly enough a couple of times you could end up in a situation where the UI displayed a different pair of languages than the internal logic had, so they added that delay, but who knows, maybe I'm theorycrafting too much.

Specific extension I use that became unusable (black text on black). However, if you look closely, you’ll see a lot of differences in look and feel that don’t seem “animation” related.

When exactly do you need floating windows?

- a happy ion2/i3 user since forever -

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.

When you want to quickly use apps without navigating away from your tiled workspace.

Especially transient dialogs, e.g. wifi/file picker. I would create rules in sway/i3 for those to keep them floating.

I've written at length about this topic on HN in the last month, so I'd hate for it to seem like my lil hobby horse, but something I've come to appreciate about the conventional "stacking" window solution of Windows/macOS is that it has a good answer for apps you briefly use.

My favorite MacOS update was when the removed the need for Rectangle, Mos, and Unnatural ScrollWheels.

/s

>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.

I’ve never really disliked the keyboard. I’m not entirely sure what they’re talking about. That being said I’ve never used swipe to text so maybe that factors in, or never having had a smartphone other than an iPhone.

okay.

Mac power user 25+ years.

Yes, it’s complete shit