A way to skip animation when switching space with ctrl+left/right (patching)

[hbouhadji]

os: 15.1.1 apple silicon

I wanted a way to disable animation when switching space with ctrl+left/right without needing skhd (mainly to challenge myself)

I've found this:

You can find it by searching: C0035FD688E243391F050071

Using lldb you can do something like that:

Basically writing 1 to the register x8 and it will be fine

Maybe this can be added to osax ? @koekeishiya

swift is really a PITA (!) to reverse

[koekeishiya]

I think it would be a lot of work to backport this for all the various macOS versions that yabai supports; for both x64 and arm64, and I don't think it is appropriate to add incomplete support.

It is unlikely that I will spend time on this, sorry.

[hbouhadji]

Not even as a experimental / hidden feature ? I'm only using the scripting addition for the animations

Guess I will try to figure out how osax works and fork it, thanks anyway

[koekeishiya]

The osax so far patches/overwrites existing instructions with either a single or multiple instructions to cover the same number of bytes, to change the animation time loaded for cmd+tab and mission-control shortcuts that go directly to a specific space by number. See https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai/blob/master/src/osax/payload.m#L375

You'd have to do something similar at the locations you discovered, and basically have it modify the register value directly.
If there are not enough free bytes to just overwrite an existing instruction with the one you need, you could create a code cave; basically allocate a separate block of memory, write a jmp/branch instruction into the target location, recreate any instructions you destroyed, do your own instructions and jump back into the appropriate location in the function, to return control back to normal.