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.

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.

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.

phren0logy

Having been ruined by Linux options like Hyperland and Niri, I’m digging my early foray into OmniWM - https://github.com/BarutSRB/OmniWM

walthamstow

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

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.

rwc

Just installed and I have to say, works exactly as promised. This is a huge quality of life upgrade, thank you for sharing it Paul.

hk1337

meh, i like the animation. I normally use it with the trackpad so the swiping back and forth makes it feel more natural if there's animation.

tomi_dev

Curious — what was the hardest part to get right here? Was it performance or handling edge cases?

aequitas

Wonderful, that leaves 2 things on the top of my list for spaces: having to hover your mouse over the top left corner of a space and waiting until it shows the closing icon. And Safari deciding its better to switch to a space and open a window that was minimised there instead of just opening a new window in the space i'm currently in (even with the "switch to a space" setting turned off!) when 1 want to open a new tab.

throwatdem12311

Can’t say that the sliding animation has ever been the bottleneck to my productivity.

benji-york

By way of experience report: I've been using this app for a week or so on my daily driver and it's been great.

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.

tptacek

God damnit I didn't know until 15 seconds ago that the Space-switching animation in macOS was annoying. Thanks a lot!

airstrike

I wonder how this compares to Aerospace, which I use daily but ultimately has felt a bit janky and slow

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)).

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

ralphc

Works on my Intel mac running Sonoma 14.8.2. I use Omakub on my Linux machine and missed this when on my mac.

jiehong

Outstanding!

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