Amethyst – A tiling window manager for OS X

First off, thank you ianyh!! Tiling window managers are a huge productivity tool, and when I see people manually resizing windows, it's painful to watch. I'm on OSX now, but used XMonad extensively when I was on a *n?x distro.

At the moment, I'm using Spectacle for OSX. http://spectacleapp.com/. Are there reasons I should use Amethyst instead? I'd love to see a feature matrix or something in you FAQ about the other options, and what Amethyst brings to the table.

A feature matrix isn't a bad idea (and I opened an issue to track https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst/issues/267), but it's kind of hard to compare as they are such different pieces of software. Spectacle is manual window management and Amethyst is tiling window management.

Manual window management generally gives you better control and generally less overhead in terms of complexity. So it works well in the case of "I want to be able to move this window to the upper half of the screen", "I want to be able to make this window take up the entire screen", etc. You have to trade simplicity to get flexibility, though. What if I want to be able to move window to the upper right hand quarter of the screen? Or what if I want my screen divided into a grid of 3x4 and I want a window in the [0][1] position? You can accomplish all of those things, but you have to specify how to go about it, thus adding complexity. Slate, for example, puts that complexity upfront in writing a config file. Divvy, for example, puts that complexity at runtime.

Tiling window management gives you a more hands off approach. So things like "I want all of my windows to be laid out in this orientation, but I don't want to move them myself", "I want all of my windows to be visible at any given time", etc. You don't take actions to lay windows out, you just define algorithms for how they should be laid out and let the software sort them out. You have to trade simplicity to get control, though. Defining those algorithms can be complicated if you're not doing something really straightforward, and if you're not doing something straightforward it can sometimes be non-trivial to grok what's actually going on. Or you end up doing a lot of runtime massaging to get things working the way you want.

To each their own, though. I prefer tiling window management, I have coworkers who prefer manual window management. They're just different tools.

You can probably run i3 in X11, although non-X11 apps won't work with it. Your best bet is to run i3 in a full-screen VM.

I researched this myself a few months back, since i3 was the biggest thing I missed when I had to switch to OS X (new company, new computer). Eventually I gave up and settled on Amethyst. It's not bad once you set up the keyboard shortcuts to your liking. The main things I miss are the tree structure for window organization, and window borders that stick together when resized.

I created some bounties on bountysource for features I'd like to see in this project. Hopefully other people want them enough to contribute as well, and ianyh will get a nice return on his contributions.

That's something I want to do. I want basically anything you can do with key commands to be possible via the mouse. Some of that comes out of the box with OS X, but some of it (like dragging to change layout parameters) is a bit trickier.