Speed up OSX Spaces by reducing or eliminating the animation delay?

Is there any way to speed up the animation when you switch from one space to another on Mac OS X?

I'd like to make the space-transition quicker, or even instantaneous.

Does anybody know of any way to do this, or any software to do so?

AKS0

Posted 2009-09-03T18:11:42.407

Reputation:

3+1 Good question (although I don't feel Spaces animation is too slow for me). My research so far indicates that there are no options to speed up/turning off Spaces animation. – hanleyp – 2009-09-06T01:09:02.310

Answers

This works on 10.7 (Mountain Lion) and below.

Open /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app

Copy and paste the following into the terminal window and then press enter:

defaults write com.apple.dock workspaces-swoosh-animation-off -bool YES && killall Dock

from hyperspace blog

John

Posted 2009-09-03T18:11:42.407

Reputation: 211

This stopped working in 10.7, and at the moment Lion users seem to be stuck with those animations: osx lion - How do you disable the window switch animation when switching spaces with Mission Control? - Super User and osx - How can I disable animation when switching desktops in Lion? - Apple - Stack Exchange

– Lri – 2011-08-04T19:40:24.883

If you can disable SIP, and you're using a modern version of OSX then you can accomplish this with the ChunkWM scripting addition.

It does this natively,

ability to switch active desktop instantly, bypassing the animation (High Sierra and Mojave)

As a side note, ChunkWM is open source. You can find the function responsible for the animation-less transitions here

Evan Carroll

Posted 2009-09-03T18:11:42.407

Reputation: 1

It looks like chunkwm has been deprecated and replaced by yabai.

– Taylor Edmiston – 2019-07-09T18:02:41.730

There is a utility app you can installed called Hyperspaces that adds features to Spaces. 6 days ago, there was an preview build from the developer which added an option to turn off Core Animation.

hanleyp

Posted 2009-09-03T18:11:42.407

Reputation: 6 519

"Hyperspaces does not run on more recent versions of Mac OS X, and is no longer supported" – Taylor Edmiston – 2019-07-09T17:55:37.853

1Comment by @Tony Arnold: Disabling Core Animation in Hyperspaces does so for the desktop only, not the spaces transition - sorry!

I'll be allowing you to use the old Space transitions from Tiger (including no transition) in a future release of Hyperspaces. – Ivo Flipse – 2011-01-09T14:34:33.483

I installed the preview build and it doesn't appear to change the animation at all. – hanleyp – 2009-09-11T04:05:07.197

Same here. The animation is annoying :) – Martin Marconcini – 2009-11-12T00:55:31.987

Go to System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts, then click "Mission Control" in the sidebar. Scroll to the bottom of the list, and expand that "Mission Control" section. Now enable the keyboard shortcuts for all the desktops.

You can now switch to space 1, by pressing ctrl-1, space 2 by pressing ctrl-2, etc. Not only does this enable you to get to a space instantly without navigating past all the other spaces, the animation for this switch is significantly faster than the default space switching animation.

daviewales

Posted 2009-09-03T18:11:42.407

Reputation: 285

ctrl-1/ctrl-2 approach appears to be same speed for me (on macOS Mojave). But if I switch ten times in a row, 11th appears slightly faster. – HeyWatchThis – 2019-05-13T15:55:11.993