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Kwm, tiling window manager for OS X

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71–76 of 76 posts

Re: Kwm, tiling window manager for OS X

#71

How many of these OS X WM replacements are configurable to use a 3-button mouse + a keyboard key for window management shortcuts? I've used X11 for almost 30 years, and inherited a twmrc file at the very start which had the following mappings which have become muscle memory to me: alt + mouse_left = move + raise alt + mouse_middle = resize alt + mouse_right = iconify I've configured KDE to do this for years. I once t…

I got annoyed enough to write a tool to emulate this behavior on OS X: https://github.com/jmgao/metamove

Re: Kwm, tiling window manager for OS X

#72

See also Spectacle: https://www.spectacleapp.com/ Maybe not the most configurable but in return you get something that works out of the box and doesn't require you to read 38 pages of README.

Just wanted to throw in a mention of Slate ( https://github.com/jigish/slate ) in here while we're talking about different options. I've been a happy user for a while now. Haven't tried the others, though.

Slate is the polar opposite of Spectacle. It's too much configuration for most people I'd say. I couldn't get it to work, and get back to my actual work in less than an hour so it was a non-starter for me.

Re: Kwm, tiling window manager for OS X

#73

I'm a fan of Mjolnir: https://github.com/sdegutis/mjolnir Hammerspoon is a less complicated fork of it: https://github.com/Hammerspoon/hammerspoon My config: https://github.com/colindean/mjolnir-config

I totally agree - Hammerspoon rocks! I'm using it to build both an Alfred/Clipboard/anysearch replacement, and a way to move the mouse around the screen using VI like keystrokes!

Re: Kwm, tiling window manager for OS X

#74
I have been looking and hoping for something OS X like allSnap [1] for Windows where window sizing management isn't set up at prefixed sizes, but simply allows you to resize Windows as normal but they will snap to the sides of other Windows or screen edges. This allows you to nicely line up all your window edges with each other with little effort.

[1]: http://ivanheckman.com/allsnap/

Re: Kwm, tiling window manager for OS X

#75
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a long time user of a similar tool called Divvy[1]. However both these tools are _not_ tiling window managers. They help us scale Windows manually by providing customizable shortcuts. A tiling window manager would take care of that automatically. Popular examples are i3[2] and XMonad[3]. As a user of both Linux and OSX, having no access to a real tiling WM is probably the biggest downside to me from an end users…

Divvy just works for me. Really, the two most common shortcuts I use are "take up the right half" and "take up the left half". That accounts for 80% of my usage of anything like a tiling window manager. In third place is an alternative for "maximize" which isn't the OS X maximize. (Has a use for certain legacy programs, and also as an alternative to OS X fullscreen.) The next two most common operations are "take up t…

I have the same use case; been using Spectacle for years now.

Re: Kwm, tiling window manager for OS X

#76
post #16

This looks really similar to bspwm[1] for Linux, which also uses a binary tree for window management, and also uses a daemon/client model for interaction with the window manager. bspwm is by far my favourite window manager, in any OS I have used. [1]: https://github.com/baskerville/bspwm

I used to use bspwm, but ended up moving back to i3wm. While i3wm is not perfect, I always found it to be more practical than bspwm. The ability to stack, for example, is very nice. What's the thing that you really like about bspwm? As much as I wanted to really like bspwm, when it came to using it for work, I just found it lacked something.

It just seems to resonate well with how I think about organizing my windows and I can predict its behaviour. For example, I almost always use manual mode when spawning new windows, so I can almost always predict how my desktop will look afterwards. I also _really_ like the dynamic configuration it provides through its client/daemon model (so you can try out different settings without changing your configuration file and restarting X), and the amount of commands that allow for fine tuning of bspwm's behaviour fits me very well since I like tinkering with it and create a configuration that does exactly what I want.
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