spaceflick

Keep the half-swipe. Lose the half-second.

spaceflick.nowmad.io

Without spaceflick	With spaceflick
the ease-out you wait through	same swipe, same rhythm

It's worse than it looks: your keystrokes keep going to the space you left until the animation finishes, so the wait isn't just visual — it's dead input time.

The four-finger space swipe is two things at once. While your fingers are down, the desktops track them one-to-one — that's the half-swipe you hold to see two spaces side by side. Then you lift, and the Dock plays a long ease-out before anything is actually focused.

spaceflick keeps the first part and deletes the second. Swipe slowly and it behaves exactly as before. Flick and you're just there. Swipe past the first or last space and it rubber-bands natively, same as always.

It's one passthrough event tap that rewrites a single number — the release velocity the Dock reads to decide how fast to finish. Nothing is intercepted, suppressed, or replayed.

Install

brew install julienR2/tap/spaceflick
brew services start spaceflick

Then add /opt/homebrew/opt/spaceflick/bin/spaceflick to System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility — an event tap can't see the trackpad without it. No restart needed: spaceflick waits for the grant and starts working the moment you flip the switch.

It runs as a launchd agent, so it comes back at login and after a reboot. Stop it with brew services stop spaceflick.

From source instead, with a proper /Applications app

git clone https://github.com/julienR2/spaceflick && cd spaceflick
./build.sh install

Uninstall with ./build.sh uninstall. To try it without installing anything:

./build.sh && ./build/spaceflick run -v     # swipe a few times, ^C to stop

Both builds are unsigned, so an upgrade invalidates the Accessibility grant — macOS keys it to the code signature. If swipes go back to feeling slow, remove spaceflick from the Accessibility list and re-add it.

Best of both worlds

	Stock	BTT	yabai	AeroSpace	Blink	spaceflick
Near-instant switch	✕	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
Half-swipe peek preserved	✓	✕	✕	✕	✕	✓
Keeps the native 4-finger swipe	✓	✕	✕	✕	✕	✓
Native macOS spaces	✓	✓	✓	✕	✓	✓
No SIP changes	✓	✓	✕	✓	✓	✓
Free & open source	—	✕	✓	✓	✓	✓
Hotkeys, jump to space N	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✕
Works inside Mission Control	✓	✕	✕	✕	✓	✕

The two bold rows are the whole reason spaceflick exists. Everything else gets its speed by replacing the gesture — swallowing your swipe and posting a synthetic one at absurd velocity — which makes the interactive peek impossible, because there's no finger left to track. spaceflick adjusts your real gesture, so both rows can be ✓.

The bottom two rows are what it gives up in exchange: no hotkeys, no jump-to-space-N, nothing inside Mission Control. Blink has all of that and is a far more complete app — if you want those, use it.

Where these values come from

I've tested only spaceflick and Blink myself. The BetterTouchTool (paid, and vastly more general than this one job), yabai and AeroSpace columns come from their own documentation plus Blink's published comparison, on the same criteria it used.

Two notes worth spelling out. yabai reaches instant switching only with SIP partially disabled and its scripting addition loaded — that's the row below it. And AeroSpace doesn't switch native spaces at all: it "employs its own emulation of virtual workspaces instead of relying on native macOS Spaces due to their considerable limitations", so the gesture rows aren't really a fair fight — it's solving a different problem, and solving it well.

You are not imagining it

This is a long-standing, widely-reported complaint, with no built-in setting:

• Switching spaces animation is very slow — Apple Community. "Even enabling Reduce motion doesn't help — the animation changes, but remains equally slow."
• Speed up desktop switching animation in macOS Tahoe — Apple Community
• Can I increase the speed of the switch spaces animation? — Apple Community
• Switching Spaces is NOT Smooth — MacRumors
• Space switching is quite slow — yabai discussion

Two details from those threads worth knowing. It's worse at high refresh rates, so ProMotion Macs have it hardest. And your keystrokes keep going to the space you left until the animation ends — which is why it feels like more than half a second even when it isn't.

Options

flag	default
--velocity N	999999	Claimed release velocity. Lower it (40, 60) for a fast-but-visible slide.
--min-velocity V	0.08	Slower releases pass through untouched, preserving peek-and-let-go.
--vertical	off	Also flick vertical swipes (Mission Control).
--no-edge-guard	off	Allow flicking past the first/last space.
--invert	off	Flip the swipe-direction mapping.
-v	off	Log every release.
probe		Log raw swipe events, change nothing. For when a macOS update moves the private field numbers.

How it works, and what doesn't

The tap

The swipe reaches the Dock as an undocumented event type 30 (kCGSEventDockControl) carrying kIOHIDEventTypeDockSwipe, with these private CGEventFields:

field	meaning
110	kIOHIDEventType — 23 is a Dock swipe
123	axis — 1 horizontal, 2 vertical
129 / 130	velocity x / y
132	phase — 1 began, 2 changed, 4 ended, 8 cancelled
135	progress bits

A tap at .cgSessionEventTap / .headInsertEventTap sits upstream of the Dock, so a .defaultTap there can mutate field 129 on the phase == 4 event as it goes past and hand it on. The Dock never knows. Two field reads and one field write per swipe — no timers, no polling, no space or window queries. Measured across 19 real swipes: 10ms of CPU total.

Decisive swipes release at around ±1–5; peeks at around ±0.005. Three orders of magnitude apart, which is why a fixed --min-velocity separates them cleanly.

The edge guard

A velocity of 999999 asks the Dock for a space index that may not exist, and it does not clamp — you land on a black screen. So on began spaceflick does one CGSCopyManagedDisplaySpaces round-trip (on the display under the pointer) to find where you are in the ordered space list. If the release heads off either end, the event is passed through untouched and macOS rubber-bands as usual.

That is one WindowServer call per swipe, at the start of the gesture where nothing is waiting on it. Positive velocity means rightward — the trackpad's scroll-direction preference is applied upstream, so the sign already encodes where you are going rather than which way your fingers moved.

Dead ends, so you can stop looking

defaults write com.apple.dock workspaces-swoosh-animation-off	Dead. The string isn't in the macOS 26 Dock binary at all. Last worked around 10.7.
defaults write com.apple.dock expose-animation-duration	Dead since Sierra, and it targeted Mission Control's zoom, never the space slide.
Accessibility → Reduce Motion	Works, doesn't help. Swaps the slide for a cross-fade of the same duration, and you lose the interactive tracking.
SLSSetSpaceTransitionDuration & friends	Don't exist. No *SpaceTransition* symbol is exported from SkyLight on macOS 26.
CGSManagedDisplaySetCurrentSpace	Exists, switches with no animation, but leaves Dock/WindowServer bookkeeping inconsistent — why yabai needs SIP disabled.

Thanks

spaceflick is a small idea on top of other people's reverse engineering.

• BetterTouchTool — where the velocity trick came from in the first place. Andreas Hegenberg worked out that the Dock's swipe events could be spoken to directly, years before anyone wrote it down.
• darwin-fast-workspace-switch — reverse engineered BetterTouchTool to recover the private CGEventField numbers and published them.
• InstantSpaceSwitcher — the compact C implementation that made the technique easy to read, and confirmed the field constants independently.
• Blink — by far the biggest influence, and the reason this exists. It's where I first saw the trick working, and reading its source taught me the parts I'd have got wrong on my own: that the velocity sign already encodes direction rather than finger motion, that the ordered space list has to be read per display, and that an edge guard is not optional. Blink does much more than spaceflick — hotkeys, a menu bar, jump-to-space-N, wrap-around. If you want those, go get it.
• yabai and CGSInternal — the long-running public record of what the private SkyLight and CoreGraphics space APIs actually are.

spaceflick's own contribution is narrow: apply the trick to the real gesture rather than a synthetic one, so the peek survives.

License

MIT