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!
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.
This strikes me as the fuckup more than anything else.
[1] https://asahilinux.org/fedora/ [2] https://youtube.com/watch?v=JjptYWKGVc4
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
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.
Shameless plug: https://github.com/gechr/WhichSpace
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)).
Damn, that's rather clever.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I can understand for mouse/kbd input though.
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.
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.
I actively dislike the notion of spaces.
Wish I could ignore mouse movement when the app switcher is displayed.
I actively dislike the notion of spaces.
What do people assume Spaces is a Windows thing? It was on Unix systems decades ago.
Caps mapped to right command.
Karabiner to map dual-cmd+jkl; to mapped vertical slice so j is left quarter, j+k is left side, etc.
dual-cmd+i moves windows between screens and dual-cmd+u rotates current window through full, top half, bottom half.
The whole thing is deterministic and super fast and gives me more permutations than I'll ever need.
The ones who don't use it is because they don’t know it exists.
Or they are still using the (deprecated) Spectacle.app — https://github.com/eczarny/spectacle
[*] if you wonder why I say “every user” even though it’s obviously not true is because everyone loves hyperbole in this website.
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
Are apple engineers not using macOS?