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Comment by asoneth | Hacker News Reader

> 'zoom' is not equivalent to maximization

Interesting, I tried a few windows that I don't normally "zoom" and you are right. I suppose prior to this I only ever attempted to perform this action on browser/document/messaging/media windows that are able to be fully maximized.

> there's a big, stupid, slow animation that must play every time you switch between workspaces

I wondered how I never noticed this, and it looks like I had Accessibility > Display > Reduce Motion enabled.

> you cannot float windows from other applications over a fullscreen window

Agreed, I found it handy the first time I discovered I could move a floating window over a maximized window in Windows, but I've also noticed that I let my windows become a lot more disorganized when I'm using Windows. I'm not saying they're related, it may be that I just don't have enough Windows experience, but I do find that I end up keeping my workspace a bit tidier on macOS or a tiling WM.

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> I wondered how I never noticed this, and it looks like I had Accessibility > Display > Reduce Motion enabled.

I use Reduce Motion too, but even then there's an animation (it's a cross-fade instead of a wipe) with the same duration and annoyance, although it is less visually distracting and doesn't try to reinforce the worse-than-useless-to-me spatial ordering.

I have to wonder if there's some deep wizardry possible, some hacky function you can call hidden way deep inside Dock.app or Mission Control.app, that will do the workspace switching without any animation.

> I have to wonder if there's some deep wizardry possible, some hacky function you can call hidden way deep inside Dock.app or Mission Control.app, that will do the workspace switching without any animation.

There's a plist file with animation speeds in it somewhere, and you can reduce the duration of the animations to something extremely low, which is what people with preferences like ours often used to do.

But some time in the last few major releases of macOS, Apple locked that away behind SIP. So to take advantage of it you have to disable some security features (not sure if you have to leave SIP off— you do for some changes but not others), and this may not be possible on a work machine.

> [disabling SIP, even temporarily,] may not be possible on a work machine

I wouldn't do it on a personal machine either (not that you're advocating that).

Yeah, the "full" installation of yabai [0] requires partially disabling SIP permanently, the reasoning for which is laid out very well in [1].

It seems like the "wizardry" I was hoping for would amount to circumventing some basic security design of post-SIP MacOS, so would either be an exploit or else equivalent to turning off the parts of SIP mentioned in [0].

[0] https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai/wiki/Disabling-System-I... [1] https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai/issues/798#issuecomment...

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