strafe

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strafe

Swiping between macOS desktop workspaces is a core part of how I personally work. I might have one Figma file open in fullscreen on one space, another open fullscreen in another space, and every other app that I am interacting with likely is in a fullscreen space dedicated to the app. It’s how I prefer to work. I swipe between these tabs like a mad-man. I use this to reference a design, go back and forth between spaces quickly and frequently.

There’s only one problem… If you work like this, you will know that whenever you 3-finger swipe between these spaces on macOS, there is a slight delay between when you swipe and when you can actually click on something post-swipe. That delay is slight. 150ms or so (I measured.) But 150ms fifty times in an hour is 7.5 seconds. 7.5 seconds each hour you work is about 60 seconds per day. It’s death by a thousand cuts.

This is my contribution to the flow state.

— Riley Hennigh

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When you swipe between macOS Spaces with three fingers, the system plays a slide animation and queues your input until the transition finishes — roughly half a second of dead time on every switch, during which clicks and keystrokes go nowhere. strafe removes that dead time. It intercepts the swipe and jumps straight to the neighboring Space, so the switch is instant and the new Space is interactive immediately.

It runs as a menu-bar accessory (no Dock icon), works with your normal 3-finger swipe, and adds keyboard shortcuts and a small CLI.

See it

图片：Side-by-side: native macOS switching vs strafe

Time to interactivity

The number that matters: after you switch Spaces, how long until the landed window actually accepts your input. macOS queues input until its transition finishes; strafe collapses the transition, so the queue never builds.

Measured on a MacBook Pro (Apple M3 Pro, 18 GB, macOS 26.3), 20 trials per mode, zero timeouts (full video):

time to interactivity (median)	native swipe	with strafe
first event delivered to the landed window	168.5 ms	49.6 ms
transition complete (input unlocks)	164.4 ms	42.3 ms

Native ranged 149–185 ms across trials; strafe ranged 30–79 ms — strafe’s slowest switch beat native’s fastest by nearly half. Two honest caveats: the native figures are a lower bound on what a human feels (the clock starts at gesture start, and a real swipe adds your own finger-travel time on top), and native duration grows with gentler swipe velocity — a variable strafe eliminates entirely. Both modes are measured identically by the same harness.

Reproduce it yourself with the bench harness, which documents the full methodology and its caveats.

Have your agent set it up

Copy this into Claude Code (or any coding agent) and it will handle everything except the one click macOS reserves for you:

Set up strafe (https://github.com/rileycx/strafe), a macOS utility that makes
Space switching instant. Steps:

1. Clone the repo and read SECURITY.md, then skim the source (~1,100 lines,
   no dependencies) and confirm the claims hold: the event tap mask covers
   only gesture events, and there is no network, subprocess, or file-write
   code. Tell me what you found before proceeding.
2. Run ./Scripts/bundle.sh and move build/strafe.app to /Applications.
3. Launch it, then open System Settings > Privacy & Security > Accessibility
   so I can grant it permission. Remove any stale strafe entries first.
4. Wait for me to confirm I granted it, then quit strafe from the menu-bar
   icon and relaunch it — the event tap is only created at launch, so the
   grant does nothing until the app restarts.
5. Have me test a 3-finger swipe between Spaces. It should be instant.

The audit step is not decoration: strafe asks for Accessibility, so make your agent verify the code before you run it. It’s small enough that it actually can.

Credit

The instant space-switching technique strafe uses — synthesizing a high-velocity Dock-swipe CGEvent with near-zero progress, and intercepting your real trackpad swipe with an active event tap — was invented and first implemented by jurplel in InstantSpaceSwitcher (MIT). The concept and the original implementation are entirely jurplel’s work. strafe is an independent reimplementation of that idea; if you want the original, go give InstantSpaceSwitcher a star. See LICENSE for the full acknowledgment and their copyright notice.

Install

strafe is distributed as source only — there is no prebuilt binary to trust. You build the code you can read.

git clone https://github.com/rileycx/strafe strafe && cd strafe
./Scripts/bundle.sh

This builds a release binary and assembles build/strafe.app (ad-hoc signed). Then:

1. Drag build/strafe.app to /Applications.
2. Launch it. It will prompt for Accessibility permission.
3. Grant it in System Settings › Privacy & Security › Accessibility.

The app is about 1,080 lines of Swift and C with no third-party dependencies — swift build finishes in seconds and you can read the whole thing. See SECURITY.md.

Usage

• 3-finger swipe — just works once strafe is running and has Accessibility. Swipe left/right between Spaces and the switch is instant.

• Keyboard — ctrl+opt+← and ctrl+opt+→ switch Spaces.

• Menu bar — click the strafe icon to enable/disable interception or check whether Accessibility has been granted.

• CLI:

  strafe switch left|right   # switch once and exit
  strafe status              # print accessibility / tap status
  strafe                     # start the menu-bar app

Permissions

strafe needs Accessibility permission, and only that. macOS requires it to create an active event tap — the kind that can suppress the slow animated swipe and replace it with the instant one.

The tap sees only trackpad gesture and dock-control events. It does not see keystrokes: the event mask excludes key events entirely, and strafe has no network, telemetry, file access, or subprocess code. Every one of those claims is grep-verifiable — see SECURITY.md for the exact file and line pointers.

To revoke: System Settings › Privacy & Security › Accessibility, and toggle strafe off (or remove it from the list).

Uninstall

1. Quit strafe from its menu-bar menu.
2. Delete strafe.app.
3. Remove its entry from System Settings › Privacy & Security › Accessibility.

That’s everything. strafe writes no preferences, caches, or other files — there is nothing else to clean up.

How it works

macOS generates a “Dock swipe” event for a real 3-finger horizontal swipe. strafe posts a synthetic one with an artificially near-zero progress and a very high velocity. The high velocity makes the WindowServer treat the gesture as a flick and skip the slide animation, jumping instantly to the neighboring Space. At the same time an active event tap suppresses your real swipe so the OS never runs its own animated version. For the field-by-field derivation, read docs/SPEC.md.

Requirements

• macOS 15 or newer
• Apple Silicon (that is what strafe is built and tested on)

License

MIT — Copyright (c) 2026 Riley Hennigh. See LICENSE, which also carries the acknowledgment and MIT notice for jurplel’s InstantSpaceSwitcher.