I Disabled Animations on My Mac, and It Feels So Much Snappier

macOS is packed with smooth, fluid animations that both look pretty and help guide you around the system. However, if you multitask heavily, these animations can start to feel a little sluggish. I disabled mine, and it made my system seem a lot more responsive.

How to Disable Animations on a Mac

I’m a big user of Spaces on my Mac. I’ve got many of these virtual desktops set up, and I set specific apps to open in specific Spaces. It’s the best way to multitask on my 13-inch MacBook screen.

But it means that during my working day, I’m constantly flipping back and forth from one desktop to another. While the animation effect this uses looks very nice, it makes things feel a little slower than I’d like, particularly when swiping between Spaces using the trackpad.

I fixed this problem by disabling the animations. You do it by going to Settings > Accessibility > Display and then toggling “Reduce Motion” on.

This replaces the sideways scrolling animation with a much quicker transition between two Spaces. It’s a lot cleaner and more responsive when swiping, as well as when Command+Tabbing between two apps.

I also use it in combination with keyboard shortcuts, which make things feel even quicker. You can enable these at Settings > Keyboard Shortcuts > Mission Control. Expand the “Mission Control” drop-down and enable the shortcuts labeled “Switch to Desktop 1,” “Switch to Desktop 2,” and so on.

Speed Up the Dock Animations

The Reduce Motion option works in a few other places as well but doesn’t remove all the animations running throughout macOS, so I removed a few more manually using the Terminal. This might sound technical, but it’s simple—just paste in the commands.

I’ve got my Dock set to Hidden, so I adjusted the speed of the animation for when it opens and closes. Open Terminal, paste in the following, and hit Enter.

defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-time-modifier -float 0.2; killall Dock

This makes the Dock appear more quickly. The “0.2” in the command is how long the animation takes in seconds. You can change that number to speed it up or slow it down. If you set it to “0,” you will turn the animation off entirely and the Dock will snap open and closed. It’s too abrupt for my taste, but it’s worth experimenting with.

This is one of many ways you can customize your Mac Dock. To revert the change, paste this command into Terminal:

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

Speed Up the Launchpad Animations

I also customized Launchpad by increasing the animation speeds using two sets of terminal commands. The first set makes Launchpad open and close more quickly. Paste this into Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.dock springboard-show-duration -float 0.2; defaults write com.apple.dock springboard-hide-duration -float 0.2; killall Dock

To undo these changes, use this:

defaults delete com.apple.dock springboard-show-duration; defaults delete com.apple.dock springboard-hide-duration; killall Dock

My second tweak was to speed up scrolling between pages in Launchpad, using this command in Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.dock springboard-page-duration -float 0.2; killall Dock

This is the command to undo that change:

defaults delete com.apple.dock springboard-page-duration; killall Dock

In both cases, you can set the “0.2” to whatever number you want. “0” turns off animations entirely; “0.5” would make the animation last for half a second. You can play around with the numbers to see what works best for you.

How Reducing Animations Makes Your Mac Seem Quicker

Cutting back and disabling the animations on my Mac doesn’t make it all that much faster, but it definitely makes the system feel snappier. It feels a lot more responsive, especially when multitasking and switching between multiple apps and windows.

It does take a little bit of time to get used to, though, because animations are such a big part of the macOS experience. And they aren’t all eye candy either. Animations are there to help you navigate your way through the system and remain oriented. Taking them away can make things confusing at first, especially when used with Spaces.

With the animations in place, Spaces are effectively lined up horizontally; with the animations disabled, it’s more like they’re stacked on top of each other.

For this reason, I’d suggest you try it out and stick with it for a while. You probably won’t like it at first, but it didn’t take me long to get used to it.

You can also reduce some animations in iOS, at Settings > Accessibility > Motion. But for this and macOS, they’re primarily accessibility features, and Apple isn’t keen on allowing this kind of customization.

Other platforms do enable it. You can turn off animations on Windows 11, and there’s a hidden setting to do it on Android too.