macOS Needs Its Spaces Grid Back
Christian Inkster (Hacker News):
With the release of macOS Lion, Apple introduced Mission Control, its new take on virtual desktops that inexplicably restricted them to a horizontal line only. I remember thinking at first that I just hadn’t seen the setting somewhere, Apple wouldn’t just completely change how I used my computer right? right?
[…]
I wasn’t alone in my frustration. Alternative solutions popped up but the best of them Total Spaces caused me weird slowdowns and relied on modifying the system dock which was a no go once that eventually required bypassing system integrity protection.
[…]
That was until a couple of months ago, when I saw that someone had managed to remove the animation from macOS when you move from one space to another, without needing system edits. This animation clearly annoyed some people but never really bothered me. However as soon as I saw a space move without an animation I instantly realised I could solve my complaints.
[…]
I like the idea of a lightweight wrapper around the native spaces, with support for desktops or fullscreen apps. Just with a grid to navigate. But there is a reason pretty much all solutions that controlled native spaces died out. macOS keeps most of the mission control apis locked down. Its not simply a matter of calling a documented api to add a new desktop, or re-arrange them around. But the ability to move to a space instantly meant I could just create a model that took the single row native spaces and presented them like a grid.
He wrote an app called GridLion—and of course ran into lots of problems with permissions for accessibility and screen recording and is excluded from the Mac App Store.
Previously:
- Window Tiling and Snapping in Sequoia
- macOS Window Management
- Spaces, Apple’s Mostly Ignored macOS Productivity Feature
- Detecting Screen Recording Permission on Catalina
- Screen Recording in Big Sur Requires Admin Account
- Sequoia Screen Recording Prompts and the Persistent Content Capture Entitlement
- Spaces in 10.5.3
