Native Instant Space Switching on MacOS

The worst part about the MacOS window management situation is the inability to instantly switch spaces, and that Apple has continuously ignored requests to disable the nauseating switching animation. Sure, it’s not that long, but I switch spaces often enough to the point where it becomes very noticeable and drives me insane.

I believe to have found the best solution to instant space switching!

But before I show you, of course, other people share the same sentiment. I claim that none of the surveyed contemporary solutions, except for what I bring up at the end of this article, suffice for what I want:

1. Enable the “Reduce motion” setting in System Settings.

   This is always the default answer to this question online, and I’m sick of it! It doesn’t even solve the problem, but rather replaces it with an equally useless fade-in animation. It also has the side effect of activating the prefers-reduced-motion media query on web browsers.

2. Install the yabai tiling window manager and use its instant space switcher.

   And to be fair, it works pretty well. 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.

3. Use a third-party virtual space manager facade, hiding and showing windows as needed when switching spaces.

   Some popular options are FlashSpace and AeroSpace virtual workspaces. I actually offer no criticism other than that they are not native to MacOS, and feel unnecessary given that all we want to do is disable an animation.

4. Pay for a license for BetterTouchTool. Enable “Move Right Space (Without Animation)” and “Move Left Space (Without Animation)”.

Without further ado, I managed to find InstantSpaceSwitcher by jurplel on GitHub. It is a simple menu bar application that achieves instant space switching while offering none of the aforementioned drawbacks.

Here I have InstantSpaceSwitcher paired up with SpaceName.

InstantSpaceSwitcher does not require disabling Security Integration Protection; it works by simulating a trackpad swipe with a large amount of velocity. It additionally allows you to instantly jump to a space number. The last thing it provides is a command line interface.

The installation instructions are not listed on the README, so they are:

$ git clone https://github.com/jurplel/InstantSpaceSwitcher
$ cd InstantSpaceSwitcher
$ ./build.sh

InstantSpaceSwitcher should now be available as a native application.

After running the above, the command line interface is available at:

$ .build/release/ISSCli --help
Usage: .build/release/ISSCli [left|right|index <n>]

Did I mention that the repository literally has one star on GitHub (me)? I want more people to discover InstantSpaceSwitcher and consider it trustworthy; hence, please consider giving it a star if you find it helpful.

Until next time!

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