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I've never liked animations in interfaces like this. It was fun to play with when Compiz was new, but it doesn't make the tool any more useful or pleasant for me to use. At least it's not as bad as the OSX "magic lamp" minimize.

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I'm not a fan of animations myself, though I think it could be somewhat useful with a tiling WM to help maintain (for lack if a better word) your orientation. Sometimes a new window will open and move the other windows around and get resized unexpectedly, or you'll move a window and lose track for a split second. Animation would show you where everything gets put so you don't have to reorient yourself. Not a very common issue, but I could see animation helping there.

Yeah they can be helpful in such cases. I used Gnome for a while and although I liked the overview animation, it was too slow for my taste and you needed an extension to speed it up, so I just disabled them. I see that Hyprland allows you to configure this OOTB though.

I want my systems functional, efficient, snappy.

One of the first things I do on a new device is to disable animations and similar "eye candy". On Gnome it's hidden, but can be changed with gnome-tweek-tools ; on Android it's hidden too, in the developer options that you have to unlock (7 taps on build number).

In both cases, those animations easily lose frames and are distracting, without talking about the frivolous power spending on portable devices, but they are enabled by default and not easily removed.

It bugs me to jo end that wrong priorities seem to apparently be the norm.

Note: when disabling animations on GNOME, a noticeable delay seems to remain before the alt-tab switcher appears.

I don't remember which extension I use to work around that; maybe this one: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1317/alt-tab-switcher...

I like gsettings. You can just put the calls in a script once and call it whenever needed. You can access everything from there. You can search for relevant keys from the terminal or with dconf editor.

If implemented well it shouldn’t cost too much energy, it is basically interpolating a value and redrawing it a few times with the GPU.

Personally a huge fan of the animation showcase, I'd be willing to take a latency hit because I find it much easier to keep track of. Obviously I overcame any such issues in order to get use standard TWMs, which I do just fine, so idk if I'd still appreciate how they feel interactively? But I'm glad to see the amount of customization available within them, maybe I'd just speed them up or otherwise adjust the curves.

I also see no problem with animations, but they should be “interactive” as in ios app switch gesture — that is, they should be as fast as the movement itself, and should be reversible, etc.

I dislike almost all desktop animations, except for sliding between virtual desktops, and an animated zoom-out to view all desktops. Particularly the first; having an animated slide between virtual desktops really helps me form a spatial feeling for where windows on different desktops are. But miss me with animated minimizing (magic lamp is the worst!), wobbly windows, etc. That sort of eyecandy is very distracting, I used it for a few days when I first tried Beryl, but never since.

Having a compositor that does desktop zoom is very nice too, although not quite in the same class of features as those eyecandy animations. Frustratingly, Kwin won't let you set a mousewheel keybind for this zoom effect, a senseless limitation. You can get around this with xbindkeys though, using config like this:

    "qdbus6  org.kde.kglobalaccel /component/kwin invokeShortcut view_zoom_in"
      Mod4 + Super_L + b:4
    "qdbus6  org.kde.kglobalaccel /component/kwin invokeShortcut view_zoom_out"
      Mod4 + Super_L + b:5

I have no clue how you'd fix this if you're using Kwin/Wayland..

For anyone like me who uses macOS and also dislikes the genie minimize effect, you can change it[1] and/or change/turn off a huge variety of animations[2].

1: https://macos-defaults.com/dock/mineffect.html#set-to-genie-...

2: https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/63477

With high refresh rate displays, Im excited to see what 0.3s duration animations look like. I have hopes a small dose of fluidity inside the fast, snappy tiled experience can add some understandability, provide some good context, while not slowing down the flow. Not, like, in compiz, making really slow navigation systems, just adding some continuity to current paradigms.

#swaylife

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