Can you COMPLETELY disable desktop switching animation on macOS?

Question

I reduced animation and transition in macOS but not completely disabled

As some people already discussed, one can "reduce motion" in accessibility settings, use defaults write to "disable" some animations, or use software like TinkerTool. But after all of that, when I switch desktops using Ctrl + Left or Ctrl + Right, macOS still displays a "fade in, fade out" animation for a few deciseconds, which is fine. But

the window focus remains messed up for a while.

Either the window on the previous desktop is still focused, or no windows are focused, for about 1 second, and I cannot perform any operation, which is super annoying and slows down my workflow.

A workaround

is to use Cmd + Tab to switch apps, or use Ctrl + 1-9 to jump to a specific desktop. In this way, the window focus is corrected. But this is a workaround, not a solution.

Modification I did

Every setting in TinkerTool.app that disables animation
"Reduce motion" in macOS accessibility settings
Some scripts, the one related to this is

defaults write com.apple.dock expose-animation-duration -float 0.1

previous discussion about this

How can I disable animation when switching desktops in Lion? talked about posting a bug and TotalSpaces.
How do you completely disable the space-switching animations in OS X Yosemite? concluded that there's no solution.
Disabling desktop switching animation on El Capitan. Solution has same problem as I have.
How can I disable animation when switching desktops in El Capitan? talked about TotalSpaces and disabling SIP.

Can you provide a video of what you mean by "the window focus is messed up"? In my experience, moving to a new desktop takes about the same time as pressing a key (e.g. CTRL right arrow), or the swiping motion on the trackpad, and the windows in the new space are immediately in focus and present. Also, what OS and what model Mac; any external monitors? I'd suggest testing the speed in a brand new user account, and see if that's better. Alternatively, don't use Spaces: just switch between application windows in the same Desktop space. — benwiggy, Jan 04 '22 at 10:19
I am using Mac Pro M1, and regardless of whether I use a trackpad gesture or a shortcut, the animation lasts for around a second and the previous window is active during this time. This is extremely annoying. — Mikhail, Jun 29 '22 at 08:29
Interestingly enough, when I plug an external monitor and make it main, the animation becomes faster! Maybe this setting is related to displays. — Mikhail, Jun 30 '22 at 14:13
I've been looking for a solution to this problem for a year now. The only thing that somewhat worked for me was Hammerspoon with spaces: https://github.com/asmagill/hs._asm.undocumented.spaces but that got patched a while ago. There is currently no good solution other than switching to Arch and i3. — EuxhenH, Jul 04 '22 at 17:17
I know this is just another workaround but ... if you have just single instance of an app fullscreen on another workspace, and you just alt+tab to it, the animation is MUCH faster. I have minimized all windows except one fullscreen on separate desktop and alt+tab to it is nice. — Rustem Mustafin, Oct 30 '23 at 08:29
The "focus is messed up" in the sense that the previous window keeps the cursor focus the whole time until the animation is completed, which apparently is more than a second. So that way I'm able to switch from my editor to the terminal in another space, start typing "git status" or whatever, getting really annoyed that the terminal somehow only registered "t status". And then later unless I'm very vigilant, I might commit a file with a stray "gi" added somewhere causing the build to break. The cursor focus SHOULD MOVE FIRST in a sensible OS, but it doesnt! — Stein G. Strindhaug, Dec 14 '23 at 11:26

score 16 · Accepted Answer · edited Sep 01 '22 at 10:32

16

yabai + keymaps

You can use yabai to manage your windows on macos and remove all animations. The yabai commands that allow you to move instantly between 'spaces' are

yabai -m space --focus prev        # move left
yabai -m space --focus next        # move right

The only other thing you will need is a program to remap the keyboard inputs. I prefer Karabiner-Elements because it gives you the most fine tuned control in my experience. But it is more for people comfortable with computer programming.

Some easier (uses a GUI) but paid options are Keyboard Maestro and BetterTouchTool. With these options you would remap Ctrl← and Ctrl→ to these system/shell/bash commands.

karabiner

If you want to go the karabiner/coding route this should get you started.

You can use Karabiner-Elements to remap Ctrl← and Ctrl→ to these commands. If you are new to Karabiner I suggest using goku to create your karabiner configuration.

I think this configuration for the karabiner.edn file (goku/karabiner config) would work

{
    :templates {
        :yabai-focus-space    "/usr/local/bin/yabai -m space --focus \"%s\""
    }
    :main [
      {
        :des "Yabai - Focus prev/next"
        :rules [
            [:!Tleft_arrow [:yabai-focus-space "prev"]]
            [:!Tleft_arrow [:yabai-focus-space "next"]]
        ]}
    ]
}

edited Sep 01 '22 at 10:32

Jav

103

answered Jan 04 '22 at 08:50

yomotherboard

577

7
This is a good idea, and I'm glad it works for you. However, there are two major pitfalls to this solution.
1. It is not native. yabai does not disable animations by changing system configuration, instead, it actively run and take control. This may not be ideal for users that want "native experiences."
2. yabai could be buggy. At least on my M1 MBP, yabai v4.0.0 fails to inject script additions and cannot switch spaces.
– Steven He Feb 13 '22 at 23:49
Thank you so much for this! I was so lost after upgrading to Monterey.. – Daniel Shin Oct 10 '22 at 02:57
Can confirm, it doesn't work with M1 – tejasvi88 Nov 20 '22 at 03:55
2

sudo nvram boot-args=-arm64e_preview_abi and rebooting solves the issue with script additions on M1 – vim Jan 15 '23 at 04:47
For anyone else who is new to Karabiner, here's a barebones Karabiner config file to bind the above commands. – Etheryte May 02 '23 at 21:18
@StevenHe: can any of these tools be used to switch between commonly used applications with Something+1/2/3 on the same desktop (or not have any sort of transitions), as it's possible on Windows and most Linux window managers? – Dan Dascalescu May 17 '23 at 19:51
1

It seems the space focus change feature of yabai needs one to disable SIP. – HappyFace Dec 29 '23 at 10:32
I think that, for the shortcuts, skhd is probably best, which happens to also be from the same guy who created Yabai. – psygo Jan 25 '24 at 14:11

score 5 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 18 '23 at 11:42

I know this question has already been answered and been accepted but I just wanted to share some of my findings about this topic. The problem I faced with the accepted answer was that with Mission Control => Displays have separate spaces set, the above behavior did not work like native macOS and instead cycled through the spaces without respecting which monitor that space is on. If you are reading this, that means this problem really pisses you off so... here is my solution.

My machine - Macbook Pro 16" Intel 2019 macOS Monterey But solution should work on M series Macbooks as well as long as yabai runs fine.

Problem

macOS spaces change animation when done via keyboard shortcuts ctrl+right/left is very slow and it feels quite annoying because it also greatly reduces the time to focus. There is no native way to get rid of this delayed animation.

Solution

We can use a tool called Yabai in conjunction with a tool like Better Touch Tool to fix this problem with the following steps.

Disable SIP partially https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai/wiki/Disabling-System-Integrity-Protection
Install Yabai as per the instructions https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai/wiki/Installing-yabai-(latest-release)
Complete installation by having it run on system start https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai/wiki/Installing-yabai-(latest-release)#configure-scripting-addition
Download jq-osx-amd64 and rename to jq from this link https://github.com/stedolan/jq/releases/tag/jq-1.6 - can save it in a folder like /Users/akay64/standalone (akay64 is my user folder, you will have your own)

Config

My /Users/akay64/.yabairc file contents, I don't need any other configs from Yabai or the tiling window manager so my config file is bare bones.

#!/usr/bin/env sh

for this to work you must configure sudo such that
it will be able to run the command without password

see this wiki page for information:
- https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai/wiki/Installing-yabai-(latest-release)#configure-scripting-addition

yabai -m signal --add event=dock_did_restart action="sudo yabai --load-sa"
sudo yabai --load-sa

Scripting

Now go to Better Touch Tool and create a new keyboard shortcut for moving to the left space, pick action "Execute terminal command (Async)" and have it run this script.

/usr/local/bin/yabai -m space --focus $(/usr/local/bin/yabai -m query --spaces --display mouse | /Users/akay64/standalone/jq ".[].index" | grep $((`/usr/local/bin/yabai -m query --spaces --space mouse | /Users/akay64/standalone/jq ".index"` - 1)))

Now do the same for moving to the right space and give it this script to run

/usr/local/bin/yabai -m space --focus $(/usr/local/bin/yabai -m query --spaces --display mouse | /Users/akay64/standalone/jq ".[].index" | grep $((1 + `/usr/local/bin/yabai -m query --spaces --space mouse | /Users/akay64/standalone/jq ".index"`)))

At this point this keyboard short cut can be bound to any other input tool, in my case I prefer to bind it to my mouse buttons.

What is this script doing?

Gets all the spaces of the current display under your mouse cursor
Gets the index of the current space under your mouse cursor
Finds the +1 or -1 (next or previous) space indexes for the current display
Passes the found index to the space --focus command to move focus to

This approach allows us to replicate the default macOS behavior (sans the animation) of only being able to change the space of the monitor your mouse it currently at rather than cycling through all the spaces regardless of the monitor.