Making macOS Bearable

Summary

Making macOS Bearable Intro Ideally, a computer system should feel like an extension of your body. When you pick up a cup of coffee, you don't consciously think, "I need to engage my bicep, extend my forearm, and grasp with my fingers." You just think "drink coffee," and your body complies. I've spent the better part of eight years on various flavors of Arch Linux, and over that time I settled into a local minimum: a system configuration where I can enter a flow state, forget I'm using a computer at all, and just focus on the work. The machine disappears. Recently, I started using macOS (my workplace issued me an M4 Pro MacBook, and I can't yet put Asahi Linux on it), and with this change, that neural link was severed. Stock macOS gives me something like motion sickness whenever I try to accomplish anything. There's just too much friction in Spaces, Mission Control, window management, all of it. So I set out to fix this for myself. The "Where's Waldo" Problem Apple wants you to use Mission Control. They want you to swipe up with three fingers, see a scattered mosaic of every window you have open, and then use your eyes to scan for the one you want. This is terrible!!! Visual search is the most expensive cognitive task you can perform while focused on doing something. Every time you have to scan the screen to find a window, you are breaking context. My hierarchy of navigation is as follows: Shortcuts: I know exactly where something is. I press a key, and I am there. Fuzzy Finding: I know what I want, but not where it is. I type three letters into Raycast, and it appears. Visual Search: This is the fallback I try to never use. Encoding Location with Aerospace The default macOS window model is "floating." Windows pile on top of each other, you drag them around manually, and Spaces lets you swipe between virtual desktops that have no enforced structure. It's flexible, but flexibility without constraints is just chaos. To fix this, I use Aerospace. It's a tiling window m...