Space Rabbit: Instant macOS Space Switching, No Animations

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Space Rabbit: Instant macOS Space Switching

macOS charges a small toll on every Space switch: a half-second slide that you pay dozens of times a day without noticing, until someone totals it up as hours a month. Space Rabbit by Tahul deletes the toll. Press your shortcut and you are simply on the other Space, the way switching always felt like it should work.

1. It rides your existing muscle memory instead of replacing it. The app reads your Space bindings straight from System Settings, so whatever shortcuts you already use keep working, minus the wait.

2. Trackpad people get the same deal. Real three-finger swipes are intercepted and replaced with instant switches, a feature ported from joshuarli’s iss. Your gesture still feels like a swipe; only the glide is gone.

3. Cmd+Tab finally makes sense across Spaces. Switch to an app that lives on another Space and you are taken there immediately instead of watching the curtain pull back. An optional setting does the same for entering and leaving Mission Control.

4. Cycling wraps around. Bind the Globe key, an F-key, or any global shortcut to cycle through Spaces and it rolls from the last one back to the first, which turns a row of desktops into one dial.

5. The trick is honest about what it is. Space Rabbit posts synthetic high-velocity DockSwipe gesture events, a technique borrowed from InstantSpaceSwitcher, with the Mission Control state machine based on FasterSwiper. The README credits all three ancestors by name, which is exactly how a tool standing on hacks should introduce itself.

6. The footprint is almost rude. A 2MB binary, 12MB of memory, zero CPU while idle, no system modifications beyond the standard Accessibility permission. It just sits in the menu bar making the computer feel faster.

7. One real gotcha to know before you enable everything. The optional Instant Dock hide setting writes directly to macOS Dock preferences, and deleting the app does not revert it. If you ever remove Space Rabbit, restore the stock behavior yourself:

defaults delete com.apple.dock autohide-time-modifier && killall Dock

Install & first run

brew install space-rabbit

The website download and GitHub releases are the same binary if you skip Homebrew. Launch it, grant Accessibility access when prompted in System Settings, and switches are instant from then on. For a fully clean setup, also enable Instant Dock hide in Preferences; it removes the residual Dock transition that otherwise lingers on each switch.

Build-from-source types get a rare treat: zero third-party dependencies, just Xcode Command Line Tools and make app. Releases ship as notarized DMGs, and the app is localized in English, French, German, Spanish, and others, with translation PRs welcomed.

Worth your time if: you bounce between four Spaces all day on a Mac and never asked to watch an animation about it.

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Crepi il lupo! 🐺