GridLion brings 2D virtual desktop grids back to macOS, 15 years after Lion killed them

An indie developer fed up with macOS Mission Control’s single-row layout of virtual desktops has built GridLion, an app that restores the 2D grid arrangement Apple shipped in Leopard Spaces back in 2006 and abandoned with Lion in 2011. The pre-Lion grid let users treat virtual desktops as spatial locations — browser in the center, editor above, Xcode top-left — building muscle memory akin to navigating physical monitors. The horizontal-only replacement broke that model and made keyboard navigation a slog across an unknown number of desktops.

Prior workarounds like Total Spaces died off because Apple keeps most Mission Control APIs locked down and eventually required disabling System Integrity Protection. The breakthrough came when the author noticed someone had eliminated the space-switching animation without system-level hacks, which made it feasible to overlay a grid abstraction on top of the native single-row Spaces by jumping directly to target desktops. An LLM-assisted prototype came together in a day; about a month of polish followed.

The post doubles as a small argument that craft still matters in the LLM era — that caring about the details is what separates a usable tool from app-store filler — and a complaint about macOS’s clunky Accessibility permission flow, which the app needs to capture global shortcuts and drive space navigation.