macOS Needs Its Grid Back
About Me
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Two decades ago I had a better Mac desktop experience than I have today. I only had a single low res (by todays standards) screen, yet I felt like Hugh Jackman in Swordfish - deftly navigating more than nine displays without thinking, muscle and spatial memory working seamlessly together.
TLDR; I built an app to return macOS spaces to its Pre-Lion Grid-enabled Glory. Read on for the increasingly rare experience of an actual human dropping a bit of nostalgia, the thinking behind why make this and some issues encountered along the way. Or just download it here
2006
Around the time I was experimenting with Japanese toilets, I was also experimenting with desktop operating systems. I had spent most of my developer career up to that point using Windows but had begun trying desktop Linux and then macOS after a popular presentation enticed me enough to buy a Mac just so I could start using TextMate.
Textmate (and its revolutionary text-snippets) were the catalyst to my migration but funnily enough I don’t remember continuing to use it for very long. Other editors quickly caught up but I stayed with macOS. My career also moved into iOS development so it wasn’t really a choice after that. In any case one thing from that era did stay with me long term.
Leopard includes an extremely competent virtual desktop implementation in Leopard, appropriately called Spaces. To some, this is a major new feature on the level of Time Machine. To me, it’s a grab bag item, albeit the headliner. Your mileage may vary.<br>― John Siracusa, ArsTechnica<br>--><br>macOS Leopard Spaces
The big OS release in 2006 was macOS 10.5 Leopard. It had a bunch of feature releases, the most notable probably being Time Machine. But 20 years on I still don’t use nor miss Time Machine. I miss what John Sciracusa’s epic review labelled a grab bag item. I miss Spaces.
Spaces introduced virtual desktops to macOS and allowed you to arrange them in a customisable grid . Anyone who has used virtual desktops in this way knows the benefit. It allows you to treat them like actual displays in spatial locations . I always favoured a 3x3 grid and treated it like I had 9 screens. Centre screen was my web browser, the screen above my web editor so I could flip back and forth with a single key press. Top left was Xcode, the screen below the iOS simulator. The other screens had other allocated applications/purposes that I don’t exactly remember (mail/itunes/chat etc…) but the benefits were obvious, I could move from one screen to another without thinking, it became muscle memory like I was looking at actual separate physical displays .
I found this grid layout so useful I ended up incorporating it into other applications I built, the grid of 16 sequencing screens you could navigate in my Drum Machine EasyBeats was directly inspired by Apple’s screens.
2011 macOS Lion
With the release of macOS Lion, Apple introduced Mission Control, its new take on virtual desktops that inexplicably restricted them to a horizontal line only . I remember thinking at first that I just hadn’t seen the setting somewhere, Apple wouldn’t just completely change how I used my computer right? right?
Wrong. So Wrong.
A single row was/is such a step backwards . If I wanted to get to a particular screen via the keyboard I now had to endure sliding horizontally the whole way. If I remembered the direct keyboard shortcut I could jump directly, but did I leave my browser on screen 7 or 8? This new layout completely destroyed any hope I had of maintaining spatial memory.
I wasn’t alone in my frustration. Alternative solutions popped up but the best of them Total Spaces caused me weird slowdowns and relied on modifying the system dock which was a no go once that eventually required bypassing system integrity protection.
Over time I gave up, and learned to deal with it. An iOS developer had little choice in the matter, and later when I moved onto a new chapter with my current employer I had already bought the extra physical screens and well… just dealt with it :sadface:.
But but window managers…
Right now I know some readers are just shouting at their screen “Learn Yabai/Aerospace/whatever”. I’ve tried them all and come away realising they are not for me. I think that its that I don’t particularly like “windows on a desktop” as a concept. It feels like shuffling between papers on a desk, sure the papers can be organised neatly, but I really just want different workstations where everything is as I left it. I like macOS “fullscreen” apps, I sometimes put them in split mode but I really like the concept of dedicated areas for one task only.
A Solution Appears
Any way like I said, I had learnt to deal with it and merely occasionally complained to my colleagues about maybe moving back to Linux with my next work machine. That was until a couple of...