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Interesting. I recently started using an M1 Mac and found the fullscreen workspaces a bit weird (coming from i3), but kinda grew to like it? I got the external trackpad and use gestures a lot (before it was Control + arrows) to navigate the workspaces.

My main issue is that all the different "Terminals" have subsets I like on them, but none have all the features I like lol. It's not a big deal though. FWIW I'm trying out the Warp term now (used wezterm on linux) and it's been mostly enjoyable so far.

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For me, those gestures are next to useless because the animation is just waaay too slow. It's literally a whole second (exactly; I just timed it) of waiting for window focus to switch.

The animation is shorter when you're on a model without a 120Hz screen, so it gets a little more bearable there.

In system preferences, under accessibility, there’s an option to “reduce motion” or something that removes that annoying animation. It’s great!

While this gets rid of the animation itself, the transition to the workspace takes the same amount of time.

When using gestures, the animations kind of match the gesture, which makes them slow because you can physically cancel them.

But some of these may help. There may be more (or less), it's been a while.

    defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled -bool false
    defaults write -g NSWindowResizeTime -float 0.003
    defaults write com.apple.dock expose-animation-duration -float 0.15
    defaults write com.apple.Mail DisableReplyAnimations -bool true
    defaults write com.apple.Mail DisableSendAnimations -bool true

Also, try to use keyboard shortcuts: the animation is muuuuch faster than with gestures. In Keyboard prefpane, Shortcuts, Keyboard, Mission Control (make sure to have many desktops created). I have desktops set to ^1..^0 and left/right to ^left and ^right (which is sadly the only way to move to fullscreen apps), and disable MRU automatic space reordering in Mission Control prefpane.

It's got nothing to do with gestures, the key combo has the same switch delay as a quick gesture swipe (Which seems to have the same delay as mission control selection) when switching workspaces.

I've spent more time than I'd like to admit trying to get rid of this workspace switch delay. The tipping point for me on it was switching to a 16" Pro with a 120 Hz screen and finding out that means it now takes longer to switch.

Got it. In my experience switching with shortcuts takes half a second (which I understand can be annoying, being an i3wm user myself) and is visibly faster than evn quick gestures, which have a slower ease-out for me (but that may be due to how I swipe)

I don't mind the animation, I actually really like the animations in macOS. I just don't want it to take a full second to switch the active window. "Reduce motion" keeps the full-second delay but replaces the nice animation with a less nice fade animation, which is kind of the opposite of what I want.

I'd be interested to know what features iTerm2 doesn't have. It's a big plus for macOS for me!

Yes, iTerm2 is one of the best macOS apps. It's the first thing we have new developers install if they're new to macOS.

On the 120Hz MacBook Pros, there's an advanced iTerm2 setting that lets you change the maximum frame rate to 120 or above (adaptive frame rate also needs to be disabled).

For monitors with a high refresh rate, it's worth checking out. You can see the difference by running:

  $ cat /dev/random | hexdump

iTerm2 is pretty sluggish, has some memory leaks that I hit every now and then, and doesn't emulate some escape sequences correctly (bold, reset).

But it has Cmd+Shift+E, which I wish some other emulators I like would just wholesale copy that feature.

Honestly, it's one of the better emulators out there; it's my recommendation if you're otherwise stuck on macOS.

I used it for a long time but switched back to regular Terminal for the lower latency, because I realized I couldn't even name an iTerm2 feature I used that Terminal didn't have. I'd just been using it because it was so widely discussed.

That's completely fair. For me the killer feature is it's multi-pane support. Being able to have several terminal panes side-by-side on screen at once without having to fiddle about with something like tmux is wonderful.

Try Kitty!

Good suggestion! IMHO Kitty is seriously underused terminal. Very fast, customizable, scriptable…

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