Changelog

Added

• With more monitors, the grid opens on all of them at once, like Mission Control — each monitor shows its own desktops. Clicking a desktop switches just that monitor and closes the grid everywhere; Esc closes it everywhere
• With more monitors, a window can be dragged in the grid from one monitor onto a desktop of another monitor — it lands on that desktop at the spot where you drop it

Changed

• Hot corners react only on the main display (the one with the menu bar)
• Settings → Apps lists desktops by their real names (your name from Settings → Layout, or the Mission Control name), grouped by monitor when there are more — instead of "Desktop 1…N" counted across all monitors. An assignment now sticks to that particular desktop even if desktops are reordered; assignments saved by older versions keep working. The list is refreshed every time you open the tab, so a renamed desktop shows its new name right away
• With more monitors, the desktop shortcuts (change desktop, move window, desktop by number) act on the monitor under the mouse cursor, use its grid size, and stop at the edge of its grid; the mini-grid and transition appear on that monitor. Before, they treated the desktops of all monitors as one list

Fixed

• With more monitors, connecting or disconnecting a monitor while the grid is open closes the grid — before, the disconnected monitor's grid landed on top of the remaining one
• System hot corners (System Settings → Desktop & Dock → Hot Corners, e.g. Mission Control) no longer fire while the grid is open; ⌘Tab is off until the grid closes
• With more monitors, a grid left open for a while no longer starts showing desktops from the other monitors too
• On macOS 27 with more monitors, adding or removing a desktop in Settings → Layout for the second monitor no longer adds desktops to the main display instead
• With more monitors, desktops with an Aerial or dynamic wallpaper no longer lose their background in the grid — the grids of the two monitors kept deleting each other's saved wallpaper snapshots and reloading all wallpapers
• The log no longer reports a false "REVERTED" warning when you switch desktops again within a couple of seconds of a previous switch

• On macOS 27, switching desktops jumps straight to the target the way Mission Control does, instead of swiping through every desktop in between — no more bouncing to another desktop when an app on the target (e.g. Safari) also has windows elsewhere. The swipe gesture stays only as a fallback
• On macOS 27, when the system pulls you away from the desktop you switched to (an app on it has a window on another desktop), the log records it as a warning, not just as info

Fixed

• On macOS 27 the log no longer fills with "unable to launch yabai" warnings when yabai isn't installed
• Starting a second copy of retro⊞spaces now shows a message saying which one is already running

Added

• macOS 27 Golden Gate support — switching desktops no longer uses yabai. On macOS 27 (grid, ⌘+arrows, ⌘+digits) it works without yabai and without changing SIP; only the Accessibility permission is needed, and no desktops flash by in between.
• On macOS 27, moving windows between desktops in the grid no longer uses yabai either - it's instant, nothing flashes on screen, and it also moves windows yabai couldn't (e.g. mail.app new message, etc.)
• On macOS 27, the shortcut that moves the active window to a neighbouring desktop no longer uses yabai either, and the window stays focused, so repeated presses keep moving it
• On macOS 27, an app's default desktop (Settings → Apps) works without yabai — its window moves there on launch
• On macOS 27, adding and removing desktops (Settings → Layout: Add / Remove Last / Match Grid, and its self-test) works without yabai and SIP — through Mission Control, which shows for a moment
• On macOS 27, the startup checks no longer require yabai or disabled SIP — only Accessibility and Screen Recording
• Settings → Layout: right-click (or Control-click) a desktop in the preview to remove that specific desktop, not just the last one
• The grid follows the number of desktops when you add or remove one in Settings → Layout: a desktop that no longer fits adds a row (or a column, if a row isn't possible), and a row (or column) left empty after removing one is dropped — you can still set any size yourself

Fixed

• On macOS 13 and 14 the app now refuses to start with a clear system message instead of starting and failing — it requires macOS 15 or newer
• The drag & drop self-test (Settings → Debug) never managed to grab its test window; it now moves a real window in the grid with the mouse to another desktop and spot, checks both, and puts everything back
• The desktop-switching self-test (Settings → Debug) on macOS 27 now reports the swipe gesture as the method instead of yabai
• A failed window move left the grid frozen — its error dialog opened hidden behind the grid and blocked mouse and keyboard; dialogs now always stay above the grid and close by themselves after 60 seconds (a question closes as "Cancel")
• Moving a window to another desktop in the grid no longer briefly shows it back on the original desktop before it lands
• A window just moved in the grid is shown on top of its new desktop, so the next click grabs it instead of the window underneath
• Window previews in the grid no longer have black edges and corners

Changed

• The grid auto-close error and the desktop-switch revert warning in diagnostics now include details about what was on screen at that moment

Fixed

• Switching desktops while Mission Control is open no longer falls back to a degraded switch that left the previous desktop's windows on screen
• Diagnostics upload failures caused by no network connection are no longer reported as errors

Added

• Diagnostics now include a random, persistent per-install ID (no link to IP or computer name) so recurring issues from the same machine can be told apart from separate ones
• The grid-panel-occluded diagnostic log line now also records the display setup (count/resolution/Retina) at the moment it fires

Fixed

• With mirrored displays (same picture on two screens), the grid could show a different, inconsistent set of desktops depending on which of the two displays it happened to open on — it now always uses the built-in display
• Grid zoom animation could start from or land on the wrong desktop tile, especially after switching desktops with a trackpad gesture or Mission Control instead of the app itself
• Fixed a file descriptor leak in the wallpaper-change watcher that grew without bound the longer the app ran
• A window preview in the grid could render outside its own tile's boundaries when the window itself was positioned off-screen
• A folder-based (rotating) desktop wallpaper no longer logs a false decoding error — it already fell back to the gradient placeholder, just with a misleading error message

Changed

• Grid open/close is now a real zoom: the desktop's tile starts filling the whole screen and pulls back into the grid (and the reverse on close), instead of a barely visible scale with a cross-fade
• During that zoom a tile no longer shows its border and desktop name, so it blends into the real desktop instead of framing it
• Grid zoom animation speed now has 10 named steps (0.10 s to 1.00 s) instead of 5, and dropped its now-redundant "Fast"/"Slow" end labels
• Desktop switch transition speed now has the same 10 named steps (0.10 s to 1.00 s) as the grid zoom speed, and dropped its "Fast"/"Slow" end labels too
• Removed the Transitions tab's "Preview" button and the note below it

Fixed

• A wallpaper change in System Settings could briefly flash every other desktop's tile back to the gradient placeholder, not just the one that actually changed

Fixed

• A Dynamic Desktop wallpaper with no live capture yet and no Files entry (e.g. a plain system default) stayed on the gradient placeholder forever instead of showing its first frame
• Any macOS update wiped the entire learned wallpaper-preview cache (colors, Aerial, Dynamic Desktop), forcing every rarely-visited desktop back to the gradient placeholder until revisited

Fixed

• Wallpapers with a ~/… path never loaded (tilde wasn't expanded)

Changed

• Log levels corrected for several non-error conditions (yabai "already focused" / not running, missing wallpaper, an unsettled desktop switch) that were logged as ERROR
• Diagnostics: repeated log lines are merged with a count instead of sent individually, capped at 200 distinct issues, and each is now attributable to the app version that produced it

Changed

• Diagnostics now sends every error/warning not yet reported, not just the last 50 — nothing gets skipped, and nothing repeats after a successful send

Fixed

• Dynamic Desktop wallpapers showed a bare gray tile on macOS 15 — that version stores no image path in the private blob, so the file named alongside it is now used instead
• A desktop whose wallpaper can't be read now always falls back to the default gradient instead of an empty gray tile

Added

• "Toggle Grid View" — new hot corner + shortcut that lays out an open grid's windows without overlap; drag and click-to-activate still work
• Settings → Hotkeys/Corners: choose whether Show Grid opens standard or exploded

Fixed

• Opening the grid no longer stalls for ~1.15s — the grid now covers the Dock and menu bar instead of hiding them, so the app stays menu-bar-only and never shows a temporary Dock/Cmd+Tab entry
• Grid panel could be created below the Dock (window level was overwritten)

Changed

• Opening the grid slower than 300ms is logged as a warning

Added

• Multi-monitor: each display now gets its own grid (its own desktops, own row/column setting), opened on whichever display the hot corner/cursor is on. Settings → Layout refreshes automatically when a display is connected/disconnected, and Add/Remove/Match Desktop now count only the selected display instead of all of them combined. Not yet solved: yabai creates new spaces on whichever display it currently has focused, not necessarily the one selected in Settings — needs a second physical display to verify a fix safely, so left as-is for now
• Anonymized diagnostics now actually send: an HMAC-SHA256-signed payload, POSTed periodically in the background. The manual "Send diagnostics now" button in Debug sends the same way

Changed

• App update check now also fires right at launch, not just on Sparkle's own ~24h interval since the last check

Fixed

• Grid tiles with overlapping windows stacked their previews back-to-front — the actually-topmost window on a desktop could end up hidden behind another window's preview in the grid, making it look wrong and impossible to click/drag
• Opening the grid via a hot corner could occasionally (repeatedly, not a one-off) take over a second — traced to macOS itself being slow to switch the app's activation policy. Mitigated by not switching back immediately after closing the grid, only after a few seconds of inactivity, so repeated use doesn't keep paying for it. Known remaining trade-off: the app briefly shows a Dock/Cmd+Tab entry during that window instead of staying menu-bar-only — to be revisited

Added

• Settings → Debug: shortcut/corner conflict checker vs macOS's own — per-row "Clear in retrospaces" / "Disable in macOS", scrollable list, runs automatically after each shortcut/corner change (new value saved only once the conflict is resolved)

Changed

• Settings window closes with Esc
• About/Permissions panels redesigned as centered vibrancy windows
• Menu bar: removed "Reload"; header logo now sizes to actual menu width

Fixed

• Grid wallpapers missing on Intel macOS 15 (no url field fallback)
• Grid wallpapers: Dynamic Desktop showed flat gray instead of the gradient fallback
• Hotkey recorder: clicking "record" now clears the old shortcut immediately instead of only on a new keypress
• Settings → Debug: added "Clear Log" / "Clear Image Cache" buttons
• yabai space --create false success could silently destroy an existing desktop — now verified before trusting it
• Loading screen polls for yabai instead of requiring a manual retry

Added

• Loading screen: a persistent "Open System Settings" button, available when individual check fails
• Single-instance guard: launching the app while it's already running is blocked
• Grid: idle auto-refresh — after 5s idle with the grid open, the window list and previews refresh every 8s
• Unrecognized solid-color and Aerial wallpapers now get their real on-screen color/preview sampled via ScreenCaptureKit and cached to disk, instead of a guessed color

Changed

• Grid now force-raises itself above other apps on open (Window Server level fix), with diagnostics logged if it still ends up occluded

Fixed

• Grid wallpapers: a desktop set to a plain "Solid Color" wallpaper
• Moving a window to another desktop via yabai could silently not show up in the grid if the idle auto-refresh fired while the move was still in flight
• Auto-update never found a new version — the build number's format changed between releases (a bare counter vs. a dotted X.Y.Z), and Sparkle compares those component-by-component, so the newer dotted one always looked older

Added

• Grid wallpapers (photo file) now update live and refreshes the affected desktop(s) as soon as the user picks a new wallpaper in System Settings
• Menu bar: icons on every dropdown item (SF Symbols), matching the icon style already used in the Settings tabs

Changed

• Loading screen: Accessibility and Screen Recording are checked as two separate steps again (the progress bar now visibly advances after each one) instead of one combined step
• Loading screen: each permission step now automatically triggers the system permission prompt the first time it's reached, registering the app in the corresponding Settings list (with the toggle off) instead of requiring the user to add it manually via "+"

Fixed

• SIP failure message no longer overflows the loading screen's scrim into the hero title — shortened to two sentences linking to the install guide
• Grid wallpapers: many desktops showed the same (wrong) default wallpaper instead of their own.
• Loading screen: the silent background poll for a permission that's already resolved (e.g. Accessibility just granted) froze the displayed message text instead of updating it to reflect what's still missing, making the app look stuck even though it was still checking correctly

Added

• Core functionality (grid overview, moving apps between desktops, switching desktops, mini-grid, settings — basic features)
• Automatic updates via Sparkle
• Custom JSON localization (English/Czech), switchable at runtime without a restart
• Developer ID signing + notarization (make release / make notarize)
• Assigning apps to a specific desktop (Apps tab)
• Per-display grid size settings (Layout tab)
• Launch at login (SMAppService)
• Hide the menu bar icon
• Grid circulation (Circulation tab) — horizontal and vertical edge wrapping, choice of how a row end connects (next row / same row)
• Self-test for circulation in Settings → Debug (arithmetic only, doesn't switch desktops)

Changed

• Settings fully localized (tab names and remaining English labels)
• Wallpaper resolution is now capped by tile size at ALL quality levels, not just "high" — decodes far fewer pixels on a smaller display or a denser grid
• Only one set of wallpapers is ever kept in memory: changing quality or column count discards the old set and removes stale desktops
• The log rotates after 2 MB to one previous generation, so it doesn't grow indefinitely at Debug level
• The desktop list is fetched from yabai in a single query instead of two per switch
• The hero banner is bundled at the size it's actually rendered at (1232×693 instead of 1920×1080) — bundle size down from 9.6 to 8.7 MB
• Dragging a window across the grid redraws only the two affected tiles instead of the whole screen (on a 5K display that was 14 million pixels, plus every wallpaper, on every tile-boundary crossing)

Fixed

• The "Try Again" button on the loading screen didn't work after granting a permission and required a full app restart. macOS remembers the answer to a Screen Recording prompt for the lifetime of the process, so a repeated check kept returning the old result — this step now has a "Restart App" button that restarts the app for you
• A deadlock at startup after upgrading from old UserDefaults — ConfigStore logged from inside its own non-reentrant lock, and Log.log reached for that same lock via Settings.logLevel, freezing the app before its window even appeared
• Concurrent access to the wallpaper cache from both the main thread and a global queue without synchronization (Swift Dictionary isn't thread-safe)
• A possible permanent hang on yabai -m query --windows: the pipe was only read after waitUntilExit(), so the child process could block on writing once output exceeded 64 KiB and the app would wait on it forever (the same pattern was also fixed for the sqlite3 wallpaper query and for csrutil status)
• A full-screen snapshot stayed in memory permanently after a transition — the release was only called for a slide in a known direction, not for a fade, a zoom, or a click on a tile in the grid
• A closed grid kept a complete snapshot (window previews, icons, wallpapers) and all of its image subviews around until it was opened again
• A disappearing arrow in the mini-grid when jumping to a desktop by number. The main cause was a collision with macOS's own "Switch to Desktop N" shortcut, which is often also bound to ⌘+number — the system switched desktops first, and the app then read the already-changed state and concluded it was a jump to itself. Along the way, a few related things got fixed too: the current desktop is now checked with yabai first (it learns about a switch before SLS, which holds onto the old value briefly), yabai's "cannot focus an already focused space" message is now treated as success instead of falling back to a degraded accounting-only switch, and when the starting desktop can't be determined, the mini-grid is skipped instead of guessing a target
• The grid's zoom-in animation (it scaled from the corner of the display, not the center)
• The ordering of the desktop switch versus the cosmetic animation (the switch used to wait for the screenshot)
• Icons in the Settings tabs (invisible due to the .recessed bezel on macOS 15)