The post introduces GridLion, a small macOS app that brings back the old pre-Lion style Spaces grid. Early OS X let users arrange virtual desktops in a 2D layout, which made workspace navigation map to spatial memory. Apple later flattened that into a single horizontal strip inside Mission Control. The author’s claim is simple: the grid was better, the replacement never caught up, and modern macOS has steadily lost small but meaningful pieces of desktop usability.
That landed because many people still organize work spatially. They described old Spaces as muscle memory, not nostalgia. Browser in the center, editor to the left, terminal to the right, reference material above, database tools below. The current setup breaks that because it hides previews, labels desktops generically, and often reorders them unless you disable the setting. The biggest practical complaint was speed. Switching spaces still forces you through animations and can ignore keypresses until the animation finishes, which makes the whole feature feel ornamental rather than operational.
The conversation widened from one missing feature to a pattern. People pointed at Mission Control’s weak defaults, fullscreen behavior that doesn’t mesh cleanly with app switching, and a general shift from window-centric computing toward app-centric abstractions. Several commenters argued the OS really needs a higher-level concept of a project or task that groups windows, tabs, chats, terminals, and tools across apps. Others said that ship has sailed on macOS and the realistic answer is third-party software or another desktop stack.
That is where the useful signal settled. On macOS, people are papering over the gaps with tools like
AeroSpace,
Rectangle,
Magnet,
AltTab, InstantSpaceSwitcher, boringBar, Charmstone, cmdcmd, and Mwitch. A few pointed to older hacks like TotalSpaces or forceFullDesktopBar, though some require disabling
SIP or code injection. The Linux contingent used the moment to advertise
KDE Plasma,
i3,
sway,
Hyprland,
Niri, XFCE,
PaperWM, and
Qubes OS as examples of desktop environments that still treat window management as a first-class, customizable system instead of a fixed product decision.
The security subthread hit the same nerve from a different angle. People are tired of Apple’s multi-step permission flows for
accessibility, screen recording,
full disk access, and similar capabilities. The dominant complaint was not that these permissions should be easy to grant, but that macOS makes experts repeatedly perform a miniature scavenger hunt through Settings instead of letting them opt into a persistent advanced mode. Defenders of Apple’s design pushed back hard. They argued the friction is deliberate and useful because ordinary users click through prompts mindlessly, scammers coach people to disable protections, and desktop systems have historically been far too permissive. Even critics of Apple’s UX often conceded the underlying problem is real.
So the thread’s bottom line was not really “bring back the grid” so much as “macOS keeps removing durable workflow affordances, then replacing them with safer but clumsier abstractions.” People still like the hardware, many still rely on the platform, but the trust that Apple will refine desktop workflows for serious users has worn thin.
blog.hopefullyuseful.com