I disklike current fullscreen behaviour

[MultiCoders]

I frequently fullscreen my videos, and prefer to play videogames in fullscreen, since tiled and/or bordered windows are quite ugly/not space efficient.

Problem 1: Imagine i have brave in workspace 1. theres a youtube video. I go fullscreen. I'm watching the video. I press ctrl 5 to switch to workspace 5. I switch successfully, but i still only see the youtube video, so I have to 4 finger swipe left to actually see workspace 5.

Problem 2: Then i finish doing my stuff in workspace 5 and i wanna go back to brave, so i press ctrl 1 cuz braves supposed to be there, but instead of taking me back to brave, i see my desktop because brave is fullscreened and i have to 4 finger swipe right again.

This workflow would behave as expected only if there weren't any swiping, and is ruined by the swiping. Regardless of whether or not i fullscreen brave, i would expect it to stay in workspace 1, immediately accessible by pressing workspace one.

Aerospace also causes alot of grievances with videogames and fullscreen behaviour for them as well. The problem is that it literally does nothing since the fullscreen game is just a native MacOS space.

I'm not proposing any solutions or technical feedback on how to achieve this. I understand we are on MacOS and not Linux. I am saying this is a usability problem, and it would be preferable if this were addressed in the long-term, or at least kept as a goal. I couldn't find anything similar about this in the GitHub issues. I did find a discussion where the creator said he doesn't really care since he barely fullscreens except to watch videos, but I find that to be an unsatisfactory reason to not fully implement this feature.

[sydalwedaie]

Yea I get what you mean. Personally, AeroSpace has been such a game changer that I literally changed the way I use macOS to live with its limitations. For example, I made the Menu Bar and Dock to auto hide and shrunk the Dock to the smallest possible size. Now every window is practically full screen. And since I use the Zen Browser, I'm blessed with a browser that has a 100% distraction-free interface without actually going full screen.

YouTube was a bottleneck until recently. I always hated the way macOS puts full screen videos in their own spaces. It wasn't like that some 10-15 years ago. So I lived with playing videos not in full screen until I found this. Turns out, if you use uBlock ad-blocker, you can add custom filters to block certain parts of the page. This filter will make the video fill the entire browser window while still in normal view. With hidden Dock and Menu Bar, and when viewed in the Zen browser, I have a true full screen YouTube experience without using native macOS spaces. It's even better than native full screen, because you can still scroll down to see the comments or channel name or even switch to another tab without having to exit full screen.

But yea I agree. These are limitations I had to work around, not features. And I don't play games so I can't comment on that either.

[MultiCoders]

Thanks for the ublock tip. I tried to hide my menu bar as well to fix this issue but it seems to either not work or the text dissappears but the app is still stuck underneath the camera cutout, how did you get past this?

[sydalwedaie]

I tried to hide my menu bar as well to fix this issue but it seems to either not work or the text dissappears but the app is still stuck underneath the camera cutout, how did you get past this?

Sorry I didn't quiet get what you mean. You hid the menu bar to fix what issue? Also, I'm blessed with a 2020 M1 MacBook Air so I can't comment on the camera cutout issue.

[MultiCoders]

So the issue is that after you fullscreen a youtube video, at least in brave, and then try to switch workspaces, nothing happens. The worskspace doesn't switch. Sometimes with games the workspace switches, but i'm still stuck in the game window and have to 4 finger swipe left. If i hide the menu bar and forced everything to be borderless then workspaces switch properly, but then my screen still stays below the camera cut out, so i lose alot of screen space.

[iandol]

I press ctrl 5 to switch to workspace 5. I switch successfully, but i still only see the youtube video, so I have to 4 finger swipe left to actually see workspace 5.

I cannot confirm this behaviour. With Vivaldi if I full screen a YouTube tab and switch workspace (I use alt keys but it shouldn’t make a difference?) it just works without issue, thus I also don’t see you problem 2…

[MultiCoders]

Well I'm definitely having a problem

[iandol]

Right so there is a configuration or application difference but this is not the default behavior of aerospace. Not with YouTube+vivaldi / chrome / safari.

Did you try a different browser to nail down the app space where this may trigger?

I do have some steam games (played through wine) and I sometimes see a “lost” space but this needs to have two monitors for that to trigger and isn’t reproducible… only some games, some of the time when there is an external monitor.

[pszypowicz]

This gap is exactly why I built Cyclist. AeroSpace can't manage native fullscreen Spaces, but they can at least become reachable: Cyclist chains workspaces and fullscreen Spaces into one ring, so Ctrl+Left/Right (or the system swipe) steps from a workspace into the fullscreen video or game and back - and coming back lands focus on a real window instead of a bare desktop. It doesn't make workspace N bindings jump into fullscreen directly, but its Cmd+Tab switcher lists fullscreen windows and selecting one navigates straight to that Space. macOS 26 only - demo and details in the linked announcement.