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Testing Tip: Make Your Keyboard Fast

28 August 2026 at 00:16

Marcin Wichary:

By default, on a Mac, the initial delay is 500ms, and the key repeat rate 1000ms.

[…]

My suggestion is to make them both as short as possible for testing.

[…]

First, it’s good to test whether your keystrokes behave well when repeated. Occasionally you might want your interface to suppress repeating, or do something special if the key is held longer.

Second, it’s a good test not just of repeating, but just the user pressing keys really fast.

Previously:

Golden Gate Sidebars and Toolbars

9 June 2026 at 19:15

Joe Rossignol:

macOS Golden Gate also has design changes. For example, apps now have a unified toolbar at the top, and the sidebar now expands to the edge of the window.

Hartley Charlton:

Sidebar behavior is also being updated. Sidebars will now expand to the full edge of the window, with refraction effects continuing beneath them rather than cutting off at the sidebar boundary. Sidebar icons will also retain their color, a change that addresses a common complaint about the original Liquid Glass implementation.

I’m really happy for these changes, but it’s not clear to me that they’re improvements over what we had pre-Tahoe or, especially, pre-Big Sur.

John Siracusa:

Oh thank god! No more margins around sidebars on macOS!

Benjamin Mayo:

sidebars now work how they used to!

Mario GuzmΓ‘n:

I just love that toolbars have clear/strict dividers again in #macOS27.

Whoever said your content and UI should blend is a liar.

What a wonderful and welcome fix in #macOS27.

Betamagic:

Instead of properly fixing the Liquid Glass implementation of NSToolbar buttons in macOS 27 Golden Gate, Apple decided to simply place an ugly, semi-transparent macOS 15-ish background bar behind the buttons, which makes Liquid Glass completely useless in the toolbar.

JoΓ£o PavΓ£o:

macOS 26 should have never been more than one developer seed release, with these changes taking place before the actual public release.

It’s sad that we had to endure this crap of a UI for a full year and now have to maintain apps for it for I don’t know how much longer.

Previously:

Update (2026-06-12): Norbert Heger:

Why has nobody told me this before?

defaults write -g NSSplitViewItemSidebarDefaultsToFloatingAppearance -bool NO

Look at this gorgeously clean sidebar on macOS Tahoe!

Jesper:

The macOS standard sidebars don’t live in a blob with very uncomfortable margins (which were required for there to be a layer fit in between the β€œtraffic light” window controls and the window’s edge).

Update (2026-06-16): Mark Sokolovsky has screenshots of the sidebars in recent macOS versions.

Update (2026-07-22): Mario GuzmΓ‘n:

No more progressive blur for scroll edges in System Settings on macOS. This is definitely a very welcome change and overall one of the many little enhancements -- driving the entire UI in the right direction. Love it.

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