Spacejump app showed me I’ve Been Using Mac Desktops Wrong

I’ve Been Using Desktops Wrong

I work from home, and like most people who work from home, I have a lot of tabs open in my brain at the same time. Client emails. The thing I’m writing. Some half-finished spreadsheet I’m scared to close. To deal with all this, macOS gives you something called Spaces — basically extra desktops you can flip between. I’ve had a Mac for, no joke, over a decade. I have known Spaces existed for most of that time. I have used them properly for almost none of it.

Here’s why. Every Space looks exactly the same. macOS just calls them “Desktop 1,” “Desktop 2,” “Desktop 3,” and so on, like a parking garage that refuses to tell you which level you’re on. So when I actually did try using Spaces — one for writing, one for client work, one for “whatever this is” — I’d end up swiping left and right like I was speed-dating my own desktops, squinting at blank thumbnails trying to remember which one had the browser tab I needed.

So I mostly gave up and just shoved everything onto one desktop, which defeats the entire point.

Someone Else Was Annoyed Enough to Fix It

I came across a post from a developer who’d hit this exact wall. They work across a bunch of macOS Spaces too — one per project, each set up with its own apps. And they had the same problem: everything looks identical, so you waste time hunting for the right desktop instead of just being on it.

Annoyed enough, they built a little app called SpaceJump to fix it for themselves. Then other people started using it. Then it became “over 200 people use this every day and email me to say thank you,” which is a nice problem to have.

What It Actually Does

The pitch is pretty simple: Apple lets you make Spaces, but never lets you tell them apart or jump to the right one fast. SpaceJump bolts that missing feature on.

A few specifics:

• You can name your Spaces and give them an icon and color. The names show up in your menu bar and inside Mission Control, so for once you actually know which desktop is which instead of guessing based on vibes.
• A quick switcher, triggered with ⌘+0, pops up a little picker of all your Spaces. You can type to filter, and hitting the shortcut again jumps you straight back to wherever you just were. You can rename Spaces right from there too.
• You can drag a window to another Space without going through Mission Control — just grab it, hold Shift, and drop it where you want it.
• It tracks time per Space and per app, with idle detection, and you can export it all to a CSV. Handy if you bill by the hour or the project and have ever lost track of where your afternoon went (we’ve all been there).

It’s built natively in Swift, sits at around 6–8MB, and runs locally on your machine — no syncing your desktop habits to some server somewhere.

How It Stacks Up Against the Alternatives

There are a couple of other tools chasing this same itch. Spaceman will show names in your menu bar, but not inside Mission Control, and it skips the quick switcher and time tracking entirely. Spaces Renamer can rename things, but that’s all it does — and on Apple Silicon Macs it apparently wants you to disable a core security feature (SIP) just to work, which is a pretty big ask for a renaming tool. SpaceJump skips all of that.

What It Costs

There’s a free 14-day trial, no card required, so you can poke at it before committing to anything. After that, it’s a one-time $9.99 — not a subscription — and that gets you lifetime updates plus use on two Macs.

So, Did It Fix My Swiping Problem?

Mostly, yeah. The biggest shift for me wasn’t even the time tracking, which I’ll admit I haven’t fully leaned into yet — it’s just finally seeing “Client Work” or “Writing” in my menu bar instead of “Desktop 3” and having my brain instantly know where to go. Turns out the bar for “good desktop organization” was just “give the desktop a name,” and somehow Apple never got there in fifteen-plus years.

If you’ve ever opened Mission Control, stared blankly at four identical thumbnails, and thought “I have no idea which one of you has my email,” this is built exactly for that moment.

Details

→ getspacejump.com

Reddit thread

Happy to answer anything, and I’d genuinely like to hear what’s missing for you.