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Speed Up an Old Mac By Disabling These Animations


If you have an older Mac, or your newer one’s just running a bit too slowly for your liking, you can disable some of the cosmetic animations to speed it up a bit. Defaults-Write has a solid collection of different Terminal commands that’ll do just that.

Disabling animations makes OS X feel a bit faster, though it also makes it a little less fun to use. Still, if you’re sick of everything being slow, you can dig into the command line to fix things up. These are verified to work in OS X El Capitan, though they should also work in Yosemite. First, head to the command line by opening up Terminal (Applications > Utilities). From there, you can type these commands to disable the animations you want off.

Disable Open/Close Window Animations

defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled -bool false

Disable Quick Look Animations

defaults write -g QLPanelAnimationDuration -float 0

Disable Window Size Adjustment Animations

defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSWindowResizeTime -float 0.001

Disable Dock Animations

defaults write com.apple.dock launchanim -bool false

Disable the “Get Info” Animation

defaults write com.apple.finder DisableAllAnimations -bool true

With that, you Mac should be a bit more speedy, albeit a little fanciful to watch. Head over to Defaults-Write for a number of other command line changes you can make to speed up the interface, including animations in Mail and Safari.

10 Terminal commands to speed up your Mac in OS X El Capitan | Defaults-Write