As much screen area as possible. High refresh rate, good color. Yes, for programming. I have a 55” LG CX 120Hz 4K OLED TV as my monitor now. Space for everything: Code, more code, documentation, filesystem, browser, notes.

Tweak everything for low latency. Example: Switch IntelliJ to the ZGC garbage collector. Give it extra RAM. Have a fast GPU. Yes, just for throwing windows around.

Fast CPU with lots of cores. Tuned low-latency high-bandwidth RAM. One big SSD RAID for everything.

Get the computer up to the speed of thought.

Automatic tiling window managers. Amethyst is good on macOS.

Organization: Workflowy, notes on paper.

I guess this is more important than I realized. I use a 4K TV too and it's pretty nice (with the exception of the menu bar being annoyingly high).

I used to have a setup that would only allow for 30Hz it and it was super painful.

Also: Glitchy animations are the biggest reason I can't use Windows. macos has some too and I find those pretty bad as well.

Mac OS has a 'reduce motion' accessability setting that might help with some of those animations.

There are other options like making some animation speeds faster (so fast that the animation is almost imperceptible) and disabling some animations in Finder. The Cocktail utility can do it, and it can be done from the terminal too.

I'm not 100% sure this is up to date, but it might be: https://osxdaily.com/2015/01/06/make-the-window-resizing-ani...

The main one is basically like this:

  defaults write -g NSWindowResizeTime -float 0.003

Then there's something called yabai which is a 'window management utility', but afaik it goes a lot deeper than other similar programs for macOS - it can disable animations and do some more stuff up to the point that you need to (partially) disable SIP to be able to make full use of it. Haven't tried but it does seems to be very worthwhile. https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai