Hacker News Reader

Comment by rectangleboy | Hacker News Reader

Similarly, I've been using AwesomeWM for a few years. Going back to OS X is frustrating to me because it's so languorous and lacking control. On Arch/AwesomeWM, I can instantly flip to the space I want, but Mission Control forces me to walk through each space, insisting on animating the sequence and taking it's time to swap in the applications as I go along.

View on HN

> but Mission Control forces me to walk through each space, insisting on animating the sequence and taking it's time to swap in the applications as I go along.

Alfred. Alt+Space by default (note you can also remove keybinds of Spotlight to make room for Alfred because I use Cmd+Space for Alfred and Alt+Space for iTerm2 fullscreen, running tmux via tmuxp).

EDIT: As joobus wrote above, I also recommend Amethyst. There's a small learning curve with the keybinds but that's it. Oh, I and I recommend Flux (remember you can temporarily put it off).

I'll plug TotalSpaces2 (https://totalspaces.binaryage.com/) here. If you're stuck with OS X for whatever reason, it's well worth the $12 to remove that god-damned animation that eats keystrokes for a full second longer than it takes my hands to start trying to interact with whatever's on the screen I'm switching to.

Try rebinding your shortcuts. These made OSX usable for me without resorting to a full blown tiling wm. It's not as fun as xmonad, but it speeds things up. There's a tweak for decreasing the animation time, I believe it's toggleable via in Prefrences.

Cmd-j/k for next/prev space, cmd-h/k for switching windows. Cmd-H/J/K/L for desktops 1-4. I spend most days in vim/screen anyway so it feels natural.

"Mission Control forces me to walk through each space"

Try swiping up instead. That'll give you a list of spaces to choose from. Certainly not as direct as your non-OS X WM but faster than stepping through each one.

Usually I'm not making the switch visually. On arch, I know what spaces each application is one and just switch to it instinctively. The visual search and movement to the trackpad ends up being slower and more annoying than a quick Super+3 or whatever it needs to be.

You can configure shortcuts to jump to a specific desktop on macOS.

You can set keyboard shortcuts for the specific spaces, specifically control + {1,2,3,4} for each space. In the keyboard section in system preferences, under "shortcuts" tab.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com