How to speed up the Mission Control animation on Mac

Mission Control's default animation takes around half a second to fan all your open windows out across the screen. That's fine once. When you're flipping between windows dozens of times a day it becomes the kind of small friction that wears on you. One Terminal command drops it to 0.1 seconds — enough to still be a visible transition, but fast enough to feel immediate.

What Mission Control actually does

Mission Control (previously called Exposé) gives you a bird's-eye view of every open window on the current Space, plus thumbnails of your other Spaces and full-screen apps along the top. You trigger it by pressing F3, swiping up with three fingers on a trackpad, or double-tapping with two fingers on a Magic Mouse.

When it opens, macOS runs a fan-out animation: all your windows spread apart and scale down to fit the screen. When you pick a window or press Escape, they animate back. Both directions use the same duration setting, so speeding it up makes both the open and the close faster.

The command

Open Terminal (Applications > Utilities) and run:

# speed up Mission Control animation to 0.1 seconds
defaults write com.apple.dock expose-animation-duration -float 0.1 && killall Dock

The killall Dock restarts the Dock process, which is where this setting lives. Your Dock will flicker briefly and reappear. From that point on, Mission Control opens and closes at 0.1 seconds instead of the default.

You can go lower — 0.05 is nearly instant — but at that speed the spatial relationship between where windows were and where they end up gets harder to track. 0.1 is a good balance.

How to undo it

To go back to the macOS default:

# restore Mission Control default speed
defaults delete com.apple.dock expose-animation-duration && killall Dock

Deleting the key lets macOS fall back to its built-in default (approximately 0.5 seconds). You don't need to know the original value — removing the override is enough.

The "automatically rearrange Spaces" setting

While you're in Mission Control territory, there's a related setting worth knowing about. By default, macOS reorders your Spaces based on how recently you used them — so the Space you used last week might have moved when you look for it today. Most people find this disorienting.

To turn it off, go to System Settings > Desktop & Dock, scroll to the Mission Control section, and disable Automatically rearrange Spaces based on most recent use. Your Spaces will stay in the order you arranged them.

This setting isn't available as a clean defaults command in recent macOS versions — the System Settings panel is the right place for it.

Other Mission Control options

In the same System Settings > Desktop & Dock > Mission Control panel you'll also find:

• Group windows by application — when on, Mission Control clusters windows from the same app together instead of spreading them individually. Useful if you keep many windows open across different apps.
• Displays have separate Spaces — when on, each monitor has its own Space strip. When off, all monitors share one set of Spaces. Requires a log-out to take effect.
• Keyboard and mouse shortcuts — you can reassign Mission Control to any key combination here, or set it to a specific mouse button if you're on a Magic Mouse.

Combining with other animation tweaks

The Mission Control speed-up works well alongside a few other Terminal changes. If you also disable window open/close animations and speed up the Dock, the overall effect is a system that responds almost instantly to every gesture:

# three changes together for a much snappier feel
defaults write com.apple.dock expose-animation-duration -float 0.1
defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-time-modifier -float 0.15
defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled -bool false
killall Dock

All three are reversible. The Dock restart at the end applies the Dock changes; the window animation change takes effect for any window opened afterwards.

If you'd rather not manage these individually, Mainspring's toggles cover each one as a labelled switch — and can flip them all back to defaults in one action.