macOS Needs Its Grid Back
The author reflects on the evolution of macOS and the loss of the grid layout feature in virtual desktops. They express nostalgia for the customizable grid of Spaces introduced in macOS Leopard, which allowed for efficient multitasking. The transition to Mission Control in macOS Lion is criticized for limiting this functionality and disrupting the user's spatial memory.
- ▪The author built an app to restore the grid layout feature to macOS.
- ▪Spaces allowed users to arrange virtual desktops in a customizable grid, enhancing productivity.
- ▪The introduction of Mission Control in macOS Lion replaced the grid with a horizontal layout, which the author found to be a significant regression.
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Record
| Original publisher | Hopefully Useful |
| Canonical URL | https://blog.hopefullyuseful.com/blog/macos-needs-its-grid-back/ |
| Publication time | Tue, 02 Jun 2026 01:28:34 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-06-02T02:02:12.090Z |
| Last seen | 2026-06-02T02:02:12.090Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | d9d0b3hRnqPM |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
macOS Needs Its Grid Back Jun 01, 2026 12 minute read Two decades ago I had a better Mac desktop experience than I have today. I only had a single low res (by todays standards) screen, yet I felt like Hugh Jackman in Swordfish - deftly navigating more than nine displays without thinking, muscle and spatial memory working seamlessly together. TLDR; I built an app to return macOS spaces to its Pre-Lion Grid-enabled Glory. Read on for the increasingly rare experience of an actual human dropping a bit of nostalgia, the thinking behind why make this and some issues encountered along the way. Or just download it here 2006 Around the time I was experimenting with Japanese toilets, I was also experimenting with desktop operating systems.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Hopefully Useful.
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