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Yabai – A tiling window manager for macOS

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Re: Yabai – A tiling window manager for macOS

#41

Post by Nevin1901 »

SamBam wrote: post #31
Nevin1901 wrote: post #6

In my personal experience, tiling window managers only work when you have a lot of screen real estate. I tried using yabai on a 13 inch m2 air, but I ended up going back to my normal workflow of just alt tabbing between windows. Most apps don’t let you see enough content when they are tiled (because of gui elements such as sidebar etc). I do love the “focus on hover” feature of yabai though. I wish macOS had that nat…

I have the same problem. I would love a tiling manager that allowed you to "full screen" the app into the tile of your choice. By that, I mean the app would snap to the edges and lose all the chrome that is normal present. So your browser window, for instance, would lose the borders and url bar until you moused to the top of the tile.

Not a tiling window manager, but the arc browser does this very well.

Re: Yabai – A tiling window manager for macOS

#42

Post by Icathian »

poidos wrote: post #28

I like rectangle [0]. It fits my needs well enough without requiring disabling SIP. I especially like the “repeated key presses resize a window on the same side” feature, so I can get cycle the size of the window on the right side of the screen from 1/2->1/3->2/3 easily. I miss i3 sometimes and this ain’t an identical replacement but it gets the job done! Turns out I don’t move my windows all that often anyways. [0]:…

On the occasions I'm using MacOS, this is what I reach for too. It works quite well, I agree.

Re: Yabai – A tiling window manager for macOS

#43

Post by vidarh »

I use Yabai on my work laptop and I'm not very impressed. Maybe I've just been spoiled by my Linux setup, which has had years of tuning, but it feels like a poor imitation of a tiling wm. I get that OS X makes it harder to fully control the experience the way you can under X, but still..

Re: Yabai – A tiling window manager for macOS

#44

Post by RCitronsBroker »

thinker5555 wrote: post #9
xwowsersx wrote: post #2

Funny to see this at the top of HN after just having uninstalled Yabai. I used Yabai for about 6 weeks. I was so thrilled about having a proper tiling window manager for Mac. I invested a lot of time setting up skhd and fine-tuning my configuration for the most intuitive hotkeys. The problem ultimately, however, is that Yabai just doesn't work well enough. It'll regularly just lose track of windows altogether, which…

I haven't had the same experience with Yabai. I've been using it happily and without issue since April, and I don't think I've had to restart it once. Before Yabai I was using Amethyst, but like your experience with Yabai, I felt like it would suddenly stop working and needed to be restarted. Maybe your experience would be flipped. https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst

same here! using yabai on my MacOS machines for about a year now, after being similarly disappointed with amethyst. Works pretty damn good for me, its a god send for me. It is part of the myriad of tweaks that make MacOS so damn good and unique to me.

Re: Yabai – A tiling window manager for macOS

#47

Post by sergiomattei »

poidos wrote: post #28

I like rectangle [0]. It fits my needs well enough without requiring disabling SIP. I especially like the “repeated key presses resize a window on the same side” feature, so I can get cycle the size of the window on the right side of the screen from 1/2->1/3->2/3 easily. I miss i3 sometimes and this ain’t an identical replacement but it gets the job done! Turns out I don’t move my windows all that often anyways. [0]:…

Cool thing: you can set a window gap too.

Discovered the setting this week, my desktop looks so aesthetic now.

Re: Yabai – A tiling window manager for macOS

#48

Post by mushufasa »

poidos wrote: post #28

I like rectangle [0]. It fits my needs well enough without requiring disabling SIP. I especially like the “repeated key presses resize a window on the same side” feature, so I can get cycle the size of the window on the right side of the screen from 1/2->1/3->2/3 easily. I miss i3 sometimes and this ain’t an identical replacement but it gets the job done! Turns out I don’t move my windows all that often anyways. [0]:…

I find rectangle actually preferable to tiling, which I've tried on my linux boxes. Rectangle has the benefits of keeping the application-defined sizes (e.g. the terminal when opened up is 80x20 instead of whatever space is available on the screen) and playing nicely with the system defaults (like command-tab, command-~ to cycle through applications and windows). I find if I ever end up using a public or someone else's device, it's easier to cope; I'm not as helpless without rectangle as I was when I got used to a tiling WM muscle memory.

And the name of Yabai -- which translates to "danger" -- never sounded appealing to me to introduce into my device.

Re: Yabai – A tiling window manager for macOS

#49

Post by rxhanson »

CSSer wrote: post #18
xwowsersx wrote: post #2

Funny to see this at the top of HN after just having uninstalled Yabai. I used Yabai for about 6 weeks. I was so thrilled about having a proper tiling window manager for Mac. I invested a lot of time setting up skhd and fine-tuning my configuration for the most intuitive hotkeys. The problem ultimately, however, is that Yabai just doesn't work well enough. It'll regularly just lose track of windows altogether, which…

You might try Magnet. It's $10 on the mac app store. I've had zero issues with it, and it has some problems sorted that other tools don't or haven't always, namely correctly tiling across monitors. I used to use Rectangle, which is open source and frankly pretty good but at the time I was using it had some warts. macOS' window management seems to not be entirely transparent. I don't know all the details, but this is…

If you don't mind me asking, what are the warts? I'm always interested in improving the app.

Re: Yabai – A tiling window manager for macOS

#50

Post by joshring »

I'll have to try this out. Currently use Amethyst + Hammerspoon scripts for my window tools. Like others in this thread, Amethyst occasionally loses track of all windows and requires a restart (esp after monitor (dis)connection).

Amethyst does a decent job at the layouts I care about.

I primarily use AwesomeWM in linux on my personal computers which has the amazing super key drag/resizing behavior for windows. I use Hammerspoon to replicate this behavior[0][1] and it works quite well.

Eventually I want to replace Amethyst and just do everything in Hammerspoon as it seems quite plausible to do window layouting with it. Will give Yabai a try as well in the meantime.

[0]: https://github.com/RingOfStorms/setup/blob/master/home/confi... [1]: https://share.joshuabell.link/ezgif-1-ef0d3e0728.gif

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