Apple, stop slowing us down with your animations

Switching between desktop spaces in macOS feels too slow. I keep my editor in one space and my browser in another, and switch between them with mouse buttons mapped to Control–Left Arrow and Control–Right Arrow. I do this throughout the day. Waiting for the slide animation interrupts my flow.

The slide helps me see where I’m going. I want to choose how quickly it happens. Apple should add an animation speed setting, with the current timing as the default, a faster preset, and an optional duration in milliseconds. It should be separate from Reduce Motion.

The core idea came from Matthew Bowen’s FasterSwiper. His work on synthetic desktop swipe gestures made SpaceJam possible.

I built SpaceJam, a small menu bar app, to try this. It intercepts those keyboard shortcuts and generates a swipe gesture to move to the adjacent desktop space.

SpaceJam lets me set the gesture duration between 50 and 1,000 milliseconds. The default is 100 ms; I use 75 ms. Switching feels much faster. These values control the generated gesture; macOS can add time for the animation to settle.

Download SpaceJam. The app is signed and notarized by Apple. Drag it into Applications, open it, and follow the permission setup. Homebrew and terminal installation are also available in the README.

The app needs Accessibility permission and must stay running. It works on my Mac with System Integrity Protection enabled and doesn’t modify system files. This version targets Apple silicon on macOS 27. It leaves trackpad swipes, Mission Control, and transitions to full-screen apps unchanged.

SpaceJam relies on private macOS interfaces, so an update could break it. Apple could provide a supported setting that works across keyboard shortcuts, mouse controls, and trackpad gestures, then extend it to other system animations.

Animation timing is a preference. Keep the default for people who like it, and let the rest of us change it in System Settings.