How to Disable All Animations to Speed Up Mac OS X

Mac OS X comes with all the awesomeness, this Apple operating system has a lot of cool features and beautiful animations on many parts. Unfortunately, all of these animations make Mac OS X run not so smoothly on older MacBook or iMac, this is my own experience, until now I’m still using a MacBook White 6,1 with Mavericks on it. 

I want my Mac OS X to run faster, so I feel comfortable when using it every day. One of the best ways is disabling all animations, such as animations when opening the Dock, App Expose, Launchpad, etc.

There are some animations that can’t be completely disabled, but the duration of the animation can be scaled down.

I found this on Ask Different, I have tried everything and it worked! ;D

Open Terminal, enter the following commands:

opening and closing windows and popovers

defaults write -g NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled -bool false

smooth scrolling

defaults write -g NSScrollAnimationEnabled -bool false

showing and hiding sheets, resizing preference windows, zooming windows

float 0 doesn’t work

defaults write -g NSWindowResizeTime -float 0.001

opening and closing Quick Look windows

defaults write -g QLPanelAnimationDuration -float 0

rubberband scrolling (doesn’t affect web views)

defaults write -g NSScrollViewRubberbanding -bool false

resizing windows before and after showing the version browser

also disabled by NSWindowResizeTime -float 0.001

defaults write -g NSDocumentRevisionsWindowTransformAnimation -bool false

showing a toolbar or menu bar in full screen

defaults write -g NSToolbarFullScreenAnimationDuration -float 0

scrolling column views

defaults write -g NSBrowserColumnAnimationSpeedMultiplier -float 0

showing the Dock

defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-time-modifier -float 0

defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-delay -float 0

showing and hiding Mission Control, command+numbers

defaults write com.apple.dock expose-animation-duration -float 0

showing and hiding Launchpad

defaults write com.apple.dock springboard-show-duration -float 0

defaults write com.apple.dock springboard-hide-duration -float 0

changing pages in Launchpad

defaults write com.apple.dock springboard-page-duration -float 0

at least AnimateInfoPanes

defaults write com.apple.finder DisableAllAnimations -bool true

sending messages and opening windows for replies

defaults write com.apple.Mail DisableSendAnimations -bool true

defaults write com.apple.Mail DisableReplyAnimations -bool true

Typing all the commands above is much faster than using any tools. But, if you need to customize other parts of your OS X, I recommend using Secrets.

Download Secrets

Secrets is a prefPane, it’s a very small package with a great support from the community, the secret preferences are updated regularly.