Space Switch Speed

Make the macOS Space-switching animation as fast as you want.

The slide between desktops — the one you get from a three-finger swipe, Control + →, Mission Control, or moving in and out of a full-screen app — takes about a third of a second, and macOS has no setting to change it. The defaults write commands you will find online stopped working years ago. Space Switch Speed adds the slider Apple never shipped.

Space Switch Speed on the web — install guide, the write-up on why defaults write doesn't work, and why the animation is slower on a 120 Hz display.

Requirements

• An Apple Silicon Mac running macOS 15 Sequoia or later. Intel Macs are not supported.
• An administrator account.
• SIP's debugging restrictions turned off. That is step 1 below. It is a real security tradeoff, so read what it means before you do it.

Install

1. Turn off SIP's debugging restrictions

Space Switch Speed changes a running Apple process, and System Integrity Protection blocks that for everyone, root included. Only one part of SIP is in the way, Debugging Restrictions, and this turns off just that part. Everything else in SIP stays on. It needs a trip to Recovery, so do it before anything else.

1. Shut the Mac down completely.

2. Press and hold the power button until "Loading startup options" appears.

3. Click Options → Continue to enter macOS Recovery.

4. Choose Utilities → Terminal from the menu bar.

5. Run:

   csrutil enable --without debug
   

6. Answer its prompts, then restart.

csrutil warns that this is an unsupported configuration. That is expected. With FileVault on, Recovery asks you to unlock the disk first; FileVault stays on.

To put it back later, make the same trip and run csrutil clear.

2. Install the app

Download SpaceSwitchSpeed-<version>.dmg from the Releases page, open it, and drag Space Switch Speed into the Applications folder beside it. Then clear the download quarantine:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine "/Applications/Space Switch Speed.app"

The app is signed but not notarised by Apple, which needs a paid Developer ID, so macOS refuses to open it until you do that. If you would rather not run a command, open the app, let it be blocked, then click Open Anyway in System Settings → Privacy & Security. Control-clicking the app and choosing Open no longer works on macOS 15.

Or build it yourself, which needs Xcode 26 or newer and skips the quarantine step:

git clone https://github.com/bisak/SpaceSwitchSpeed
cd SpaceSwitchSpeed
make install

3. Set the speed

Open Space Switch Speed and drag the slider. The first change asks for your password once. That is all.

Usage

The slider has five stops: Default, Gentle, Balanced, Quick and Instant. Default is Apple's animation untouched, and each stop after it is a fixed fraction of that. A change takes effect as you release the slider. Sliding back to Default turns Space Switch Speed off entirely.

Your password installs a small background helper that puts the setting back whenever Dock restarts, so the app does not need to stay open. After an update, the next change asks once more. The setting is shared by every account on the Mac; from a standard account, each change asks for an administrator's password.

macOS lists the helper under System Settings → General → Login Items & Extensions. Switch it off there and Dock goes back to normal at once.

Uninstall

Space Switch Speed → Remove Space Switch Speed… puts Dock back, removes everything it installed, and quits. Then move the app to the Trash. If a Dock could not be put back, it says so instead and leaves killall Dock to you.

Or just delete the app. The helper notices within a few minutes, puts Dock back and removes itself. killall Dock clears the patch from that Dock at once, but while the helper is installed it puts the patch back within a second; the switch under Login Items, above, is what stops it.

This is everything it puts on your Mac:

• /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.bisak.spaceswitchspeed.helper.plist
• /Library/PrivilegedHelperTools/com.bisak.spaceswitchspeed.helper
• /Library/Application Support/SpaceSwitchSpeed/, which holds your setting
• the app's own preferences file in your home folder, which Remove clears for the account that runs it

System Integrity Protection

This is a real security tradeoff. The steps are in Install; this is what they mean.

Space Switch Speed works by writing to the memory of Dock, a running Apple process. With SIP fully on, macOS forbids that for every process, root included, and no permission dialog or entitlement allows it.

SIP is a set of protections rather than one switch, described on Apple's page About System Integrity Protection. Only Debugging Restrictions stands in the way, and csrutil enable --without debug turns off that one alone. Afterwards csrutil status reports unknown (Custom Configuration) and lists each protection separately:

Protection	csrutil disable	--without debug
Filesystem Protections	off	on
Kext Signing	off	on
DTrace Restrictions	off	on
NVRAM Protections	off	on
BaseSystem Verification	off	on
Debugging Restrictions	off	off

What you keep. Filesystem Protections: root still cannot write to /System, /bin, /sbin, most of /usr, or Apple's app bundles, which is how something that has got root would otherwise make itself permanent. Gatekeeper, notarisation, sandboxing, TCC, FileVault and the sealed system volume are unaffected too.

What you give up. Anything already running as root can attach to any Apple process and read or write its memory. That is a genuine loss of defence-in-depth, and it is exactly the capability Space Switch Speed uses. On Apple Silicon, any csrutil change also lowers the boot policy to Permissive Security; the partial configuration keeps the protections in the table but does not restore Full Security.

A full csrutil disable, which is what most guides tell you to run, also works. It gives up every row of that table for no benefit here.

Whether the trade is acceptable is your call. A shared Mac, a work laptop under an MDM policy, or anything holding credentials you cannot rotate: leave SIP alone and don't use this tool. A personal Mac where you already run unsigned software: the added risk is small, and tools such as yabai ask for the same thing.

Space Switch Speed never changes your SIP configuration. It detects the state, says so, and stops. Turning anything off is a deliberate act performed by you, from Recovery, and csrutil clear reverses it completely.

How it works

Dock does not play a timed animation when you switch Space. It runs a spring, and the switch ends when the spring has settled. Two constants in Dock set how stiff that spring is.

Space Switch Speed changes those two constants in the running Dock process, solving for the pair that gives the speed you asked for. Nothing is written to disk, and the change disappears when Dock restarts, which is why the helper puts it back. Default writes Apple's own constants back exactly, and Balanced really is half the time.

The disassembly, the constants, the patch and why it is safe are written up in docs/REVERSE-ENGINEERING.md, and rendered on the web.

Why defaults write doesn't fix this

Search for "macOS space switch animation slow" and every result tells you to run one of these:

defaults write com.apple.dock workspaces-swoosh-animation-off -bool true
defaults write com.apple.dock expose-animation-duration -float 0.1

Neither does anything on any current macOS. The first was real in Mac OS X Lion and was removed over a decade ago. The second only ever affected Mission Control's zoom, never the Space slide. Neither string exists in the Dock binary any more. There is no preference to set because there is no duration: the animation is a spring.

Reduce Motion (System Settings → Accessibility → Display) does work, but it replaces the slide with a cross-fade and flattens every other animation on the system with it.

Where people keep asking

• can I increase the speed of the switch spaces animation? — closed, with Reduce Motion marked as the answer.
• Speed up desktop switching animation in macOS Tahoe — closed, no setting found.
• Switching spaces animation is very slow on high refresh rate screens — open, and filed with Apple as a bug.

What it does not do

• Modify Dock, or anything else on the system volume. The Dock binary is byte-identical before and after; everything it does write is listed under Uninstall.
• Persist in Dock. The change lives in one process's memory, and killall Dock clears it; the helper then puts it back. If anything ever looks wrong, the switch under Login Items stops the helper and puts Dock back at once.
• Change your SIP configuration, run a curl-to-bash installer, or phone home.
• Write to anything it has not identified. It finds the code by its shape, not by hardcoded addresses, and checks that Apple's exact constants are present before touching anything. On a macOS build it doesn't recognise, it does nothing and says so.
• Touch any other animation. Mission Control, Launchpad, window minimising and app switching are unchanged.

Compatibility

Architecture	Apple Silicon only.
macOS	15 Sequoia or later. 13 and 14 drive the animation from a fixed 60 Hz timestep rather than the display's, and are refused.
Displays	Any refresh rate, any number of monitors, nothing to configure. Each stop is roughly the same fraction of Apple's own timing on 60, 120 and 144 Hz; see the FAQ.
SIP	Debugging restrictions off is all it needs. A full csrutil disable also works.

Which versions are verified

Each Dock below was checked against the binary from Apple's restore image for that build. make check-dock does the same for the Dock on your own Mac.

macOS	Dock
13.0 (22A380)	2206	refused
14.0 (23A344)	2273.1.100	refused
14.6.1 (23G93)	2273.105	refused
15.0 (24A335)	2341.0.1	works
15.6.1 (24G90)	2341.6.1	works
26.0 (25A354)	2427.0.4	works
26.2 (25C56)	2427.2.4	works
26.4 (25E246)	2427.4.7	works
26.6.2 (25G83)	2427.6	works
27.0 beta 8 (26A5425a)	2571.0.6.402	works

FAQ

Will a macOS update break it? It may. The animation is found by the shape of its code rather than by address, which has held across every release in the table above, but a real rewrite of Dock would defeat it. When that happens it refuses to patch rather than guessing, and killall Dock clears anything it had already done.

Is the animation slower on a 120 Hz or ProMotion display? Yes. Dock's spring runs per frame, so the same constants animate about a third slower on a 120 Hz display than on a 60 Hz one, and Apple has not changed that. Space Switch Speed does not read the refresh rate; each stop is roughly the same fraction of Apple's timing on any display, within a tenth at Balanced and a fifth at Instant, so Quick on a ProMotion display is still a little slower than Quick on a 60 Hz one. The measurements are in the write-up, and there is a fuller explanation of why high refresh rates are slower.

Is this about "Spaces", "desktops" or "workspaces"? All the same thing. Full-screen apps are Spaces too, so the slider covers moving in and out of those as well.

Can I remove the animation entirely? Instant covers the distance in 50–70 ms, which reads as a cut. Anything faster fights the trackpad's gesture tracking. For no animation at all, use Reduce Motion.

Does it slow down my Mac or use battery? No. It changes two numbers Dock already reads every frame. The helper waits on events and wakes once a minute to check nothing was missed. No code is injected.

Is this the same as yabai, Amethyst or Rectangle? No. Those are window managers. This changes one animation.

Why does it need root as well as the SIP change? The SIP change makes attaching to Dock possible; root makes it permitted. Both checks are separate.

Alternatives

	Speed	Animation	Needs
InstantSpaceSwitcher	5 presets	Immediate, or a shortened Dock slide	Accessibility
space-rabbit	5-step slider	Immediate, or a shortened Dock slide	Accessibility
Blink	5 presets, plus custom	Immediate, or a shortened Dock slide	Accessibility
FasterSwiper	Duration and easing curve	Its own easing curve	Accessibility
strafe	3 presets	Immediate, or an 80–110 ms ramp	Accessibility
instantspaces	Two build-time modes	Immediate, or a fixed 0.125 s slide	SIP relaxed, code injection

Most of these post a synthetic trackpad swipe, so they need only Accessibility. Dock finishes the switch itself, which is why the result is either immediate or Dock's own flick. FasterSwiper and strafe drive the slide themselves, so those two have a duration to set. instantspaces patches Dock instead, overwriting its transition duration.

macOS 27 changed the event format. space-rabbit, FasterSwiper, iss and noswoosh have code for it; the rest do not. None of it is settled while 27 is in beta.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome, particularly reports from macOS versions or hardware I cannot test on. make lists every target, and make ci runs the same checks a release does.

If Space Switch Speed refuses to patch your Dock, open an issue with your macOS version, build number and Mac model, and what the helper said:

log show --last 1h --predicate 'subsystem == "com.bisak.spaceswitchspeed"'

Disclaimer

This software is provided "as is", without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including but not limited to the warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement. In no event shall the author or copyright holder be liable for any claim, damages or other liability, whether in an action of contract, tort or otherwise, arising from, out of or in connection with the software or the use or other dealings in the software.

Specifically and without limitation, the author accepts no liability for:

• Any consequence of disabling System Integrity Protection, including security compromise, malware, data loss or theft
• Any instability, crash, hang or data loss in Dock, the window server or macOS
• Any damage to hardware, software, or data, or any loss of business, profit or time
• Any breach of warranty, support agreement or corporate security policy resulting from modifying your system

This project is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Apple Inc. It modifies the behaviour of Apple software in memory at runtime. Doing so may violate the macOS software licence agreement. Determining whether you are permitted to run it is your responsibility.

You run this entirely at your own risk. If any of the above is unacceptable to you, do not use this software.

License

GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 or later.

You may use, study, modify and redistribute this software. If you distribute it, or run a modified version as a network service, you must make your source available under the same licence.