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

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNBWt4NvqHg

Design good interfaces, with sane defaults but do not handcuff power users!!!

I often hear people say no one should care because there aren't many power users. They're a small portion, but that's absurd framing. They matter a lot because they're the ones that push your design language, develop new ideas, influence the general community, build new programs, find your bugs, and all of that. Apple and Microsoft are closing the ecosystems to get more control not only to exploit the users more (scrape their data) but to reduce bugs and things. But more and more people are trying these random programs because they can't figure out how to do things the right way. It's exactly why people are getting more frustrated with computers. The general public still doesn't care about data harvesting but they do care that the restrictions are handcuffing them now.

Funny enough this is also why Linux is becoming more popular. You've always had complete control but in the last 5 years the barrier to entry has plummeted. It's still not right for the average joe but it's on its way and a few more specialty distros are already there (e.g. steamos). The irony is Apple had the right idea before, even if not as modifiable as Linux, it used to be easier. But now it's more like a power trip. Consolidating control because they don't know what else to do

https://github.com/nikitabobko/AeroSpace

[1] https://asahilinux.org/fedora/ [2] https://youtube.com/watch?v=JjptYWKGVc4

I don’t consider paying for quality software a drawback!

I’ve been using BetterTouchTool ever since the 2016 Macbook Pro with Touch Bar, so I guess that’s a decade now. It turned the Touch Bar into the best productivity enhancement I’ve ever experienced from a laptop, and evolved to suit even more use cases beyond the Touch Bar.

I consider it completely indispensable, and I doubt it would still be in (very) active development today if fans like me weren’t paying for it.

After a restart, and after Finder has opened multi-tab windows I have open before, clicking on a tab can suddenly move my view and the window to another space.

Apparently different tabs in the same window can think they belong to different spaces.

Something (I perceive as) common to a lot of the (perceived) increase in Apple software glitches recently, is I cannot fathom the logic for which the bug makes any sense. It does not feel like I am seeing corner case bugs, but instead major "bad-model" code, revealing its poor design.

I will hopefully soon have the time to try to make it more robust. Feel free to take a shot at it if you want!

You can also use Rectangle or Spectacle or others in place of Raycast.

Foolproof with zero magic.

[1] https://github.com/wojciech-kulik/FlashSpace

The M5 chip is way ahead of Intel's latest, even Panther Lake. But the Snapdragon X2 Elite looks like a viable alternative. It's the only competitor with comparable single core performance, and it comes with 48 GB of extremely fast RAM for a reasonable price with great battery life. Unfortunately Linux support isn't really there yet, but hey M5 MacBooks don't support Linux well either.

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 shortcut applies instead of the system-level one.

Works well. No extra software needed if you already have BTT, which is worth the money for me purely for "alt+drag a window from anywhere" style window movement. That setting is buried deep under BetterTouchTool Settings → Window Snapping & Moving → Moving & Resizing Modifier Keys: https://cleanshot.com/share/mnF9xBkW

just sharing for sh*ts n' giggles... inspired by this post and a previous annoyance i had around spaces in general... i just 'vibe coded' (don't start) this using codex this morning (built upon InstantSpaceSwitcher's UI)

https://www.jjcosgrove.com/assets/videos/spaced.mp4

basically:

- you can set custom names per space

- you can hotkey-navigate to each space/any space

- it has a visual indicator in menubar (active/vs inactive in case you use mission control)

- you can show a nice grid overlay (to click or arrow-nav to a space)

- it has unified shortcut/name management via UI (rather than needing a seperate util)

names are retained on restarts, spaces are synced if mission control creates any (as best as you can with mac's private apis).

for personal utilities like this, it works quite well and sometimes its good to just have 'fun'

oh and the 'jank' relates to how spaces works (i think), but can be removed/avoided by enabling 'reduce motion' which i think the original post mentions.

I generally have fixed workspaces for different things: first for a browser, second for a code editor, third for a terminal, and so on. If I want to switch between the browser and code editor, I can do that with a single key binding, usually Alt+Tab. The same binding lets me switch between the code editor and terminal just as easily.

When you have something like 10 different workspaces, not having this key binding becomes annoying. If you need to alternate between windows on workspace one and workspace eight, you're stuck using both hands to press Control+1 and then Control+8. But with a last-active-workspace key binding, you can just Alt+Tab between them. This is the killer feature I always need.

I actively dislike the notion of spaces.

All these apps that I tried only fix the ctrl+→, but not application switching

[0] https://github.com/thebookisclosed/ViVe

No Secure Boot, no TPM, no SIP, no phoning home to the mothership to check if I'm allowed to launch an app, no spyware, no telemetry, no update nags, no trying to trick me into upgrading to the next major version.

I tried Sway & Wayland but IntelliJ freaked out so I went to x11

Also Nouveau seems pretty damn good these days.

KeepassXC works much better on Linux which is nice.

I'm keeping my M4 Macbook Air around for a while to play with local LLMs but it's not exactly the best for that, so I'll think it'll be on eBay not before long, because MacOS is getting more and more annoying...

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.

Use shortcat to bring your cursor to any element with just typing.

This looks great though, will give it a go!

Shameless plug: https://github.com/gechr/WhichSpace

Looks like HN hug of death killed your comments section though:

> An error occurred: API rate limit already exceeded for installation ID 65180581.

Apple. You suck.

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)).

But I note with disappointment that is quite buggy:

- For apps that are set to appear on every space, they sometimes don't accept focus after switching to another space. Probably a macOS bug. Looks like some other window is receiving focus instead, and the front window isn't properly activated.

- The animation isn't completely gone. macOS will animate the switching when you use Cmd+Tab to switch to an app that is in a different space.

I tried the yabai + skhd recently, but I didn't like that I had to disable System Integrity Protection.

Apple being completely oblivious to what normal people actually need or want is like bad weather- can’t do anything about it (Apple is so big and unregulated), just try not to forget to take an umbrella.

I would appreciate if anyone has i3/sway keybindings that work alongside this, otherwise I might just vibecode something in Swift. I know that there is some window management keybinds within System Settings, maybe I need to look into that also, but I don't think they'll behave the way I want them to

This has bothered me ever since I switched to a mac from i3wm.

I wish you and your loved ones all the best <3

Damn, that's rather clever.

I can understand for mouse/kbd input though.

It didn’t seem to bother the rest of the Mac world, but I used to organize my desktops in a chaotic way that worked great for me, and the ability to see the preview thumbnails as soon as I popped into mission control or whatever they call it enabled me to quickly go where I wanted to after a quick glance. I used to rename entire desktops, too.

The whole thing instantly became worse for me when they took away my ability to name your own virtual desktops, and added the extra speed bump of making me mouse up to trigger the previews. I’m still bitter about it.

Truly baffling how apple haven't done this before

If one has a disability that hinders his or her ability to use a mouse/trackpad, then I strongly suspect there is no way for such a person to use spaces on macOS well. Though, it seems Apple could not care less.

I used to use yabai for this but I can't disable SIP anymore on a work laptop.

Also, stuff like this is why I really hate macOS sometimes.