Stop using MacOS spaces. Never full screen anything. Throw everything around with hotkeys using OSS rectangle. Use shortcat to automatically bring your cursor to anything on your screen and use enter to click and type.
Spaces are not for fullscreen but for basically virtual desktops i3 linux style
Here is superior user experience:
1. Install moom. Its keyboard windows arrangement is second to none. Its two-step tiling is a killer. Ie caps-a to show a popup with all the shortcuts, then “a” letter for vertical 1/3 of the screen. Or s for middle 2/3. Or q for top left third — you can assign any letter for any portion of the screen.
2. Use option1-6 to switch between desktops
3. For example alt-4 is a desktop where you have all on one screen (suppose you have 6k xdr like i do): safari, mail, messages, telegram, hey email, reeder
alt-3 is your productivity desktop where you have things, calendar, basecamp, notes, ia writer
alt-1 and 2 is for your main work like rider ide or what have you
Alt-5 for your remote stuff like remote desktop, servers, what have you
—
So with this you have a mental model of where everything is always and instant switching to it. Want to see your todos and notes? Alt-3. Want to see your browser and messaging? Alt-4. You get it.
Moom is better than tiling manager for screens like 6k 32” xdr.
Otherwise tiling managers are perfectly fine. For instance on windows I use komorebi
This is a core part of my workflow and is one of the reasons why I would have a difficult time using Windows as my primary OS: its virtual desktop support is far too weak in comparison. It can't even switch desktops independently per-display.
You can use the app in in this post for that.
—
Or if you want the animation, switching is built-in on macos
What you need to do:
1. Create 6 spaces. This is a crucial first step.
2. Go to system settings — keyboard — keyboard shortcuts… — mission control — expand mission control — manually set “switch to desktop 1” to alt-1; rinse-repeat till 6.
3. Go to system settings — desktop and dock — disable “automatically rearrange spaces based on most recent use”
Finder, chromes, etc. it will cause automatic switching.
Also, cmd-tab doesn’t have a filtered mode for the active space
Cmd-~ actually works better when using stage manager, because it goed through all active windows across all apps
1. When switch into an application switch to a space with open Windows for the application.
2. Automatically rearrange space is based on most recent use.
Nothing provides structure, and separation
Ideally I’d just run 6 users in 6 spaces
The whole cmdtab shouldn’t show applications without windows nor als with no window in the current space
I would try setting up a space for, eg, all my communication stuff. But suddenly I’d need to drag-and-drop an image from my image editor into Slack. Or I’d want to drag a graphic from Safari into Final Cut Pro. Or any number of cross-workspace operations
How do you handle this with spaces? Do you initiate the drag, tap the space hot key, then drop?
Yes.
That’s why with trackpads I enable three fingers for dragging, so I don’t need to press anything
—
Also if you drag your file and hold on app’s icon in dock, it will show that app
option-cmd-o BOOM, outlook opt-cmd-g Bang, Ghostty opt-cmd-v POW, VSCode opt-cmd-s Boff, Slack etc etc...
ALSO: I learned this from some prior thread on something similar.
I do use alt-tab, to switch between the multiple windows of the same app. (Something's happened with my AltTab config, not sure if it's due to corp background system software or a Tahoe update, but I no longer see the mini screen shots of the different window states.)
The rule is simple: one app per space, and Ctrl+{1,2,3…} switches to the corresponding space in O(1). For me space 1 is an IDE + terminal, 2 browser, 3 messaging, 4 bug tracker, 5–6 AI agents etc. It was fast to learn: get a DM, press ^3; to file a bug, press ^4 etc. I use this with the Rectangle app for window tiling, and this combination works great for me; I rarely ever use Cmd+Tab.
I also have a personal menubar app that's very similar to SpaceName, to quickly get the current ID when multiple spaces have a similar layout (e.g. terminal takes the left half, a browser the right half).