Comment on macOS Needs Its Spaces Grid Back by Philipp

The grid was genuinely more usable than the horizontal strip — spatial memory meant you could navigate to Spaces by position without reading labels. Losing that in Lion was a significant regression that Apple never acknowledged.

With the grid gone, the identification problem got worse: in a horizontal row, all your Spaces look identical unless you memorize the order. And the order changes if you have "Automatically rearrange Spaces based on most recent use" enabled (which is on by default).

I ended up building a tool to work around this — SpaceJump adds names, colors, and icons to each Space, visible in the menu bar. There's a fuzzy-search Quick Switcher (Cmd+0) that lets you jump by name rather than position, which sidesteps the horizontal-strip navigation problem entirely. It also does passive time tracking per Space with idle detection — an accidental feature that turned out to be useful.

It doesn't bring back the grid (I wish), but it at least makes the horizontal layout navigable by giving each Space a persistent identity you can search for. The complementary tools in this space: FlashSpace (free, open-source) bypasses native Spaces entirely with its own window-hiding system — no animations, fully configurable. Hyperjump is a newer app focused on naming and jumping. TotalSpaces was the gold standard for grid restoration but has been struggling with SIP/API restrictions in recent macOS versions, as you mentioned.

$9.99 one-time, 14-day trial at getspacejump.com. I'm the developer — built it out of the same frustration with post-Lion Mission Control.