noswoosh

Instant, animation-free switching between macOS Spaces (3-finger swipe or Ctrl+←/→). Works on macOS 26.6+ and 27, no SIP disabling, no global Reduce Motion.

Install

brew install --cask mmathys/tap/noswoosh

This installs noswoosh.app, runs the one-time system configuration, and starts a login daemon.

Then grant Accessibility permission — macOS gates synthetic events behind it, and it's the one step that can't be scripted. Approve the prompt on first start; if you dismiss it, noswoosh opens System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility for you, where you can add /Applications/noswoosh.app yourself.

That's it — the daemon picks the grant up within a second, and both a 3-finger horizontal swipe and Ctrl+←/→ switch spaces instantly.

git clone https://github.com/mmathys/noswoosh.git
cd noswoosh
./scripts/install.sh

Usage

Two ways to switch, both instant:

• 3-finger horizontal swipe — your normal Spaces gesture, minus the animation. noswoosh intercepts the real swipe and replaces it with an instant switch; vertical swipes (Mission Control, App Exposé) are left untouched.
• Ctrl+→ / Ctrl+← — one space right/left.

Movement is clamped at the first and last space, so there's no rubber-band bounce.

Multi-display works exactly as it does without noswoosh: the switch applies to the display under the pointer, not the one holding keyboard focus. With "Displays have separate Spaces" off, all displays share one set and move together.

A CLI is available for scripting and debugging:

noswoosh list      # "space 2 of 4"
noswoosh right     # switch once and exit
noswoosh left
noswoosh setup     # apply system config (teardown reverses it)
noswoosh teardown
noswoosh version

For a custom shortcut, bind noswoosh left / noswoosh right in any hotkey tool that runs a command — skhd, Karabiner-Elements, Hammerspoon or Raycast. The switch lands in ~100ms either way, so there's no speed penalty versus the built-in Ctrl+←/→.

How it works

macOS has no supported way to disable only the space-switch slide animation:

• The old defaults write com.apple.dock workspaces-swoosh-animation-off died with Lion (2011).
• Reduce Motion works but is global — and it's a crossfade, not an instant cut.
• Per-app accessibility settings (Reduce Motion for the Dock alone) exist on iOS, not macOS.
• yabai can do it, but only with SIP partially disabled.

noswoosh takes the approach used by InstantSpaceSwitcher, WhichSpace and BetterTouchTool: synthesize a Dock-swipe trackpad gesture with near-zero progress and high velocity. The switch runs through the Dock's own pipeline — so Mission Control, focus, wallpaper and Dock state all stay consistent — but the animation has zero distance to travel, making it instant.

Two input sources feed one switch core. An event tap watches for real 3-finger horizontal swipes, suppresses them before the Dock animates, and posts the instant switch — so a natural swipe still works, just without the slide. A Ctrl+arrow hotkey posts the same switch directly. The two are independent: if the tap is ever disabled by the system, Ctrl+←/→ keeps working.

macOS 27 tightened this up: it validates synthetic Dock swipes against a serialized IOHID payload the older technique doesn't carry, so pre-27 builds silently stop switching. noswoosh detects the running OS and, on 27, attaches that payload (layout reverse-engineered from joshuarli/iss); on 26 it uses the original lightweight path unchanged.

The name: swoosh is Apple's own word for the space-slide animation, from the long-dead Snow Leopard setting workspaces-swoosh-animation-off. This is that setting, resurrected.

The empty-desktop yank

While building this we found a macOS behavior reproducible with plain native switching: switch to a desktop with no windows, and ~400 ms later macOS yanks you to a different desktop. The chain, confirmed in the Dock's log and by instrumenting app activations:

1. Landing on a space with no windows, macOS picks some other app and activates it.
2. That app orders its key window in — and that window lives on another space.
3. The Dock's window-order follow rule fires (switching to space N for window(...) ordered on non-visible space) and you're yanked to wherever that window lives.

The tempting fix is defaults write com.apple.dock workspaces-auto-swoosh -bool NO, which stops the Dock registering for that notification at all. noswoosh shipped that through 1.6.4 — and it costs you Dock-icon-follow, clicking a Dock icon to jump to the space its window is already on. Disassembling the Dock shows why the two can't be split: the rule's switcher has exactly one caller, that same notification block. One pref, both behaviors. (It's also a separate code path from the "switch to a Space with open windows when switching to an application" setting, AppleSpacesSwitchOnActivate — toggling that does not help.)

So since 1.7.0 noswoosh leaves the pref alone and removes the cause instead: the moment the daemon lands on a space with nothing to focus, it takes activation itself. macOS still activates its pick, but that app never gets to order its off-space window in first, so the follow never fires — measured margin is ~380 ms. Dock-icon-follow keeps working, natively, with all of the Dock's own semantics intact.

The daemon has no windows and no menu, so the menu bar stays with whatever macOS picked and nothing is visible. The only trace is that keystrokes typed at an empty desktop go nowhere — which is where they were already going.

macOS 27 doesn't need this, and doesn't get it. 27 activates Finder on a windowless landing; Finder owns the desktop and has no off-space window to order in, so the chain never starts. The guard is gated off on 27+ — running it there would only displace Finder, and on an empty desktop that's the app you want active.

Two variants that seem like they should work and don't, recorded so nobody re-tries them: parking a real window on the destination space (verified resident — it still yanks, so emptiness is the trigger, not the cause), and taking activation before the switch (the switch re-activates macOS's pick on landing and wipes it out).

Troubleshooting

Ctrl+arrows or swipes do nothing. Check ~/Library/Logs/noswoosh.log. A waiting for Accessibility permission line as the last entry means the daemon still isn't trusted; once you grant it, the log shows Accessibility granted and the daemon restarts itself. A could not create swipe event tap line means the same thing — the tap needs Accessibility, and the restart after granting fixes it.

The Accessibility checkbox won't stick. Remove the entry with "−" and let the daemon re-trigger the prompt, then approve it. If it still won't take:

launchctl kickstart -k gui/$(id -u)/ax.max.noswoosh

Spaces switch in an unexpected order. Turn off "Automatically rearrange Spaces based on most recent use" in System Settings → Desktop & Dock.

Caveats

• macOS 26.0–26.5 is not supported (Apple fixed the underlying bug by 26.6). Those builds have a WindowServer race where a zero-travel synthetic switch drops the destination space's window compositing surfaces: the switch itself works, but you can land on a space whose windows never paint (blank wallpaper) until something re-orders them. The full investigation — root cause, every attempted workaround (alternate event shapes, phase pacing, surface pre-warming, post-landing heals, direct SkyLight switching), and why each fails — is in issue #1. The fix is to update macOS to 26.6 or later.
• Private APIs. SLSCopyManagedDisplaySpaces, the undocumented gesture CGEventFields, and the macOS 27 IOHID payload layout are all unsupported by Apple and reverse-engineered — any macOS release can change them. When a release does, the symptom is switches silently stopping; the fix is adapting the gesture payload (as the 26 → 27 change already required). noswoosh gates each path behind a runtime OS check so a future break can be isolated to one path.
• Apple Silicon quirk. The reference implementations use FLT_TRUE_MIN as the gesture progress; that subnormal float is flushed to zero (sign lost) somewhere in the event pipeline on Apple Silicon, making every switch go the same direction. This port uses 1e-4, which survives and is still visually zero. Both OS paths use it — the macOS 27 path used full travel (±1.0) through 1.7.0, which switched correctly but visibly slid; 1.7.1 made it near-zero there too.

Uninstall

brew uninstall --cask noswoosh     # or: ./scripts/uninstall.sh, from source

This stops the daemon, removes the LaunchAgent, and restores the system Ctrl+arrow shortcuts that setup disabled. Remove the Accessibility entry manually if you like.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome. The whole tool is one Swift file (noswoosh.swift); build it with:

swiftc noswoosh.swift -O -o noswoosh \
    -F /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks -framework SkyLight

Releases are cut by bumping noswooshVersion and pushing a matching vX.Y.Z tag; CI builds, signs and publishes the app and updates the Homebrew cask.

Credits

• Gesture technique: jurplel/InstantSpaceSwitcher (the ±FLT_TRUE_MIN progress trick and three-phase gesture) and gechr/WhichSpace.
• macOS 27 IOHID payload and swipe-interception approach: joshuarli/iss (ISC).
• Force-front technique: koekeishiya/yabai.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.