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.
