Turn off or speed up window animations on a Mac
· 5 min read
macOS animates most of what a window does: opening, closing, minimizing into the Dock, going full screen, and moving between Spaces. Some of that is adjustable in System Settings, and the rest lives in preference keys you set from Terminal. Every change here reverts with one line.
What is actually animating
Worth separating, because they have different fixes.
- A new window or a sheet scaling into place when it opens, and scaling away when it closes.
- Minimizing: the Genie or Scale effect that pulls a window down into the Dock.
- The Dock icon bouncing while an app launches.
- Full screen, and the slide between Spaces.
- Mission Control spreading the windows out and gathering them back.
- Quick Look zooming out of the file you pressed Space on.
- Finder’s own motion: Info windows, progress, items sliding into position.
None of these are slow because your Mac is struggling. They are slow because they were timed to be seen: a few hundred milliseconds each, several times a minute. Removing them will not raise any benchmark. It removes a wait you did not choose. The exception is a Mac driving a large external display at a scaled resolution, or an older machine on integrated graphics, where the same animations drop frames. There, turning them off is a genuine fix rather than a preference.
Start with the switches macOS gives you
Two places, no Terminal.
System Settings, Accessibility, Display, Reduce Motion. The broadest single switch on the Mac. Switching Spaces becomes a crossfade instead of a slide, full screen stops sweeping across, and many apps shorten or drop their own animations because they check this setting. If you change one thing, change this one. Reduce transparency and motion for a calmer, faster Mac covers the rest of what it affects.
System Settings, Desktop & Dock. Three controls in the Dock section:
- Minimize windows using: change Genie effect to Scale effect. Scale is noticeably quicker.
- Minimize windows into application icon: on, so minimized windows stop accumulating along the Dock.
- Animate opening applications: off, which stops the launch bounce.
That covers most of the visible motion using settings any future macOS version will keep honoring.
Turn off window opening and closing
The animation when a window or a sheet appears has no switch. It has a key:
defaults write -g NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled -bool false
-g is the global domain, so the setting applies to every app using the standard macOS window machinery. Log out and back in, or at minimum quit and reopen the apps you want it to apply to, because apps read this when they start.
Apps that draw their own windows instead of using the standard ones can ignore it. Expect the change in Finder, Mail, Notes, Preview and System Settings, and possibly not in a browser or a design app.
Speed up the resize animation
When a window resizes itself (a preferences window swapping to a wider pane, for instance) macOS animates the change. This sets how long that takes:
defaults write -g NSWindowResizeTime -float 0.001
Use a very small number rather than zero. It has no effect on dragging a window’s edge, which was never animated in the first place.
Mission Control, the Dock and Quick Look
These live in the Dock’s own preferences and apply as soon as the Dock restarts:
defaults write com.apple.dock expose-animation-duration -float 0.1; killall Dock
Mission Control opens almost immediately at 0.1. Zero works, and some people find it disorienting: the windows are simply there, already spread, with no sense of where they came from.
defaults write com.apple.dock launchanim -bool false; killall Dock
That stops the launch bounce, the same result as the System Settings checkbox. Use whichever you prefer.
Quick Look’s zoom is global:
defaults write -g QLPanelAnimationDuration -float 0
Finder has a blanket key of its own:
defaults write com.apple.finder DisableAllAnimations -bool true; killall Finder
One honest caveat. Apple has moved which layer draws these animations more than once, and a key that clearly worked on an older macOS can quietly do nothing on a newer one. Set one, watch for the change, and if nothing happens, delete the key again rather than collecting settings that do nothing.
Put everything back
Each key reverts by deleting it:
defaults delete -g NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled
defaults delete -g NSWindowResizeTime
defaults delete -g QLPanelAnimationDuration
defaults delete com.apple.dock expose-animation-duration
defaults delete com.apple.dock launchanim
defaults delete com.apple.finder DisableAllAnimations
killall Dock; killall Finder
If Terminal reports that the domain or the key pair does not exist, that key was already at its default and there is nothing to undo. Log out and back in for the global ones to clear. What defaults write does and how to undo one safely covers what these commands touch and how to read a value before you change it.
If you would rather not use Terminal
Every key above is a real macOS setting that the system honors without showing it anywhere. Mainspring (https://trymainspring.com/) lists them as labeled power-ups: no window animations and faster Mission Control are two of more than ninety, alongside instant Dock and reduce transparency. It snapshots the current value before writing a new one, so one click puts it back. There is a one-day trial with every power-up included and no account; after that it is $29 once for up to three Macs.
It does nothing Terminal cannot do. What it saves is remembering six key names months later, when you want the Mac back the way it was. For a single setting, the command above is the shorter path. If you hide your Dock, make the Dock appear instantly is the other half of this.
Questions
Will turning off animations make my Mac faster? Not in any way you could measure. It makes the Mac feel more direct, because you stop waiting through transitions. On an older Mac, or a high-resolution external display where the animations visibly stutter, it also removes a real hitch.
Do these settings survive a macOS update? Preferences in your home folder normally carry over. A major upgrade occasionally resets one, and some keys stop being honored in a new version. If the animations return, run the commands again and see which ones still bite.
Is Reduce Motion enough on its own? For most people, yes. It is a supported setting, it will keep working, and it covers the transitions that take the longest. The Terminal keys handle the remainder: window opening, Quick Look, and the exact speed of Mission Control.
Does any of this affect battery life? Not meaningfully. Compositing a window animation is a fraction of a second of GPU work. Turn them off because you prefer the machine that way, not to save power.