Comparison
TotalSpaces is dead. What now?
TotalSpaces was one of the best Space management tools ever made for macOS. It gave you a grid of desktops, custom transitions, drag-and-drop window management, and the ability to rename your Spaces. BinaryAge built something genuinely useful. But the app hasn't kept up with Apple's hardware and OS changes, and at this point it's effectively discontinued.
Last updated: April 2026
What TotalSpaces was and why people loved it
TotalSpaces, made by BinaryAge, let you arrange your macOS Spaces in a grid instead of Apple's default horizontal strip. Two columns by three rows, four by two, whatever layout suited your workflow. You could see all your desktops at once and drag windows between them. It cost $12 as a one-time purchase.
The grid view alone made it worth the price for a lot of power users. macOS has always limited you to swiping left and right through Spaces in a single row, which gets cumbersome once you have five or six desktops. TotalSpaces let you think about your Spaces spatially. "Email is top-left, code is center, Slack is bottom-right." That kind of mental map.
It also added custom transition animations between Spaces, the ability to rename desktops, hotkey navigation to any Space in the grid, and an overview mode that showed all Spaces with their contents. Some people used it for years as an essential part of their setup.
BinaryAge is also known for TotalFinder, another popular macOS utility. They had a track record of building reliable, polished tools. TotalSpaces wasn't some hobby project.
Why it stopped working
TotalSpaces required deep access to macOS internals. Like many tools that modify how Spaces behave, it needed System Integrity Protection (SIP) to be disabled. On Intel Macs, this was a straightforward process and a trade-off many users were willing to make.
Apple Silicon changed the equation. The M1 chip introduced a new security architecture that made SIP disabling more restrictive and broke many of the code injection techniques TotalSpaces relied on. BinaryAge released TotalSpaces3 as an attempt to support newer macOS versions, but compatibility kept slipping.
macOS Sonoma and Sequoia broke things further. The internal APIs that TotalSpaces hooked into changed in ways that made the grid view unreliable or completely non-functional. Users reported crashes, visual glitches, and Spaces that wouldn't transition properly.
BinaryAge hasn't released updates to fix these issues. Their website still lists TotalSpaces3, but there's no indication of active development. For practical purposes, the app is discontinued. If you bought it and upgraded your Mac, you're out of luck.
What macOS still doesn't do natively
Apple has improved Spaces over the years, but the core limitations that made TotalSpaces popular haven't been addressed. You still can't arrange Spaces in a grid. You still can't rename them. You still can't assign hotkeys to jump to a specific Space by name.
Stage Manager was Apple's most recent attempt at rethinking window management, and it went in a completely different direction. It groups windows into sets on the side of your screen. Some people like it. But it doesn't replace the spatial organization that a Space grid provides.
Mission Control still shows your desktops as a horizontal strip of thumbnails at the top of the screen, labeled "Desktop 1", "Desktop 2", and so on. If you relied on TotalSpaces to make sense of multiple desktops, macOS alone won't fill that gap.
Your options now
TotalSpaces did several things at once: grid layout, Space renaming, custom transitions, window dragging between Spaces, overview mode. No single app has replaced all of that. But depending on which features you actually used most, there are options.
If the grid layout was your main draw, FlashSpace is worth looking at. It's a newer app that brings back grid-based Space management without requiring SIP to be disabled. It takes a different technical approach than TotalSpaces did, which is how it stays compatible with Apple Silicon and current macOS versions.
If naming your Spaces and quickly switching between them was what you cared about most, SpaceJump focuses specifically on that. It shows your current Space name in the menu bar and gives you a keyboard-driven Quick Switcher to jump between named Spaces.
You might end up using both, or neither. It depends on which part of TotalSpaces you actually miss.
How SpaceJump handles the naming and switching side
SpaceJump lives in your menu bar. You assign a name to each Space, and the current one is always visible at the top of your screen. No guessing which desktop you're on.
Press ⌘+0 and you get the Quick Switcher, an overlay that lists all your Spaces by name. Type a few letters to filter, hit enter to jump. It's faster than Mission Control when you know where you want to go.
There's also a "jump back" feature that returns you to whichever Space you were on previously. Handy if you quickly check something on another desktop and want to get back without thinking about it.
SpaceJump tracks time per Space automatically. If you organize your desktops by project or client, you get a passive log of where your hours went. You can export it as CSV.
It doesn't require SIP changes. Works on M1 through M4 and every current macOS version. $9.99 one-time with a 14-day free trial.
What you'll still miss from TotalSpaces
The grid. That was TotalSpaces's signature feature, and nothing fully replicates the experience of seeing all your Spaces laid out in rows and columns with live previews of their contents. FlashSpace comes closest, but it's a different app with a different feel.
Custom transition animations are also gone. TotalSpaces let you choose how Spaces animated when you switched between them. Cube transitions, slides, fades. It was a bit flashy, but some people genuinely found it helped them maintain spatial awareness of where each Space was in the grid.
The ability to drag windows between Spaces in the overview mode was also useful. macOS lets you do this in Mission Control, but only in the horizontal strip. TotalSpaces made it feel more natural with the grid layout.
SpaceJump doesn't try to replace any of that. It solves a narrower problem: knowing which Space you're on and getting to the right one quickly. If the grid was your whole reason for using TotalSpaces, SpaceJump alone won't be enough.
Side-by-side comparison
| TotalSpaces | SpaceJump | |
|---|---|---|
| Status | Discontinued | Active development |
| Grid Space layout | Yes | No |
| Rename Spaces | Yes | Yes |
| Names in menu bar + Mission Control | No | Yes |
| Apple Silicon support | Broken | Full support |
| macOS Sonoma/Sequoia | Broken | Full support |
| Requires SIP disabled | Yes | No |
| Quick Switcher | No | Yes |
| Time tracking | No | Yes, with CSV export |
| Custom transitions | Yes | No |
| Price | $12 one-time | $9.99 one-time (14-day trial) |
Frequently asked questions
Is TotalSpaces actually discontinued?
BinaryAge hasn't officially announced an end-of-life, but TotalSpaces3 hasn't received updates that fix compatibility with Apple Silicon or recent macOS versions. The app doesn't work on Sonoma or Sequoia, and there's no public roadmap for future releases. For practical purposes, it's abandoned.
Can I get a refund for TotalSpaces?
That depends on when you purchased it and through which channel. If you bought directly from BinaryAge, you'd need to contact their support. If it was through a bundle or promotion, the refund policy of that seller applies. Given how long ago most purchases were made, a refund may not be possible.
Does SpaceJump give me a grid view of my Spaces?
No. SpaceJump focuses on naming Spaces and switching between them quickly. It doesn't change how macOS displays or arranges your desktops. If grid layout is what you need, look at FlashSpace instead, or use it alongside SpaceJump.
Will TotalSpaces ever come back?
It's possible but unlikely. The technical approach TotalSpaces used, hooking into macOS internals with SIP disabled, has become increasingly difficult with each macOS release. Apple is clearly moving in a direction that makes these kinds of system modifications harder. BinaryAge would need to fundamentally rearchitect the app, and there's been no sign of that happening.
Picking a path forward
TotalSpaces was a genuinely good tool that solved real problems with macOS window management. It deserved better than a slow fade into incompatibility. But that's where things stand.
If the grid layout was your core use case, check out FlashSpace. If naming and fast switching was what kept you on TotalSpaces, give SpaceJump a try. The 14-day trial is free, so you can see if it fits your workflow before committing.
Neither app is a full TotalSpaces replacement on its own. But between them, you can get most of the functionality back on a Mac that actually runs current software.