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Yabai – A tiling window manager for macOS

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Re: Yabai – A tiling window manager for macOS

#51

All I want (for christmas) is an 'Always on top' opton for windows on macos. I'd pay real actual money, as I suspect would many others.

Piqued my interest so I just went looking, this relatively recent reddit thread lists a few relevant options: https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/q1pgos/keep_a_window_o...

I hope one works out!

Re: Yabai – A tiling window manager for macOS

#52
post #13

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…

Have you heard of Phoenix [1]? It seems relatively unknown but I actually found it to work better than Yabai in some ways. The gist is that it basically simulates a tiling wm and virtual desktops by internally tracking state. This also means it doesn't suffer from window animation delays when you switch "desktops" (since "desktops" are just hiding/unhiding windows). It's also highly hackable/extensible being written…

Does this allow using the mouse? Maybe not common amongst tiling window users but I like to just drag a window over another to swap them or resize one window from the frame and have the other tiles adjust accordingly. So far it seems only Amethyst and Yabai do this, but if Phoenix internally tracks the states of windows (position, etc.) then this should be feasible to write code for without relying on Mac's windowing api?

Re: Yabai – A tiling window manager for macOS

#53
I've been using Yabai + skhd for years, and found the benefits far outweigh the issues. 99% of the time it's fine, and for the 1% I just disable it temporarily.

Killer feature for me (apart from windows automatically being resized to fit, which is great), is ctrl+i to switch to screen i, and ctrl+shift+i to move the current window to screen i. I tend to have 2 windows max per screen, and use Yabai to flit between screens / flit windows to different screens.

(I used i3 on Linux prior to setting up Yabai, and configured shortcuts to be similar to i3.)

Re: Yabai – A tiling window manager for macOS

#54

https://www.hammerspoon.org/ is amazing. Not quite the same as Yabai but I cant live without it!

Integrating hammerspoon as the keybinding manager for yabai is a perfect match. You can treat yabai as an api for window management, and script some pretty cool things, like sending the current window to a new space, and either keeping focus or not, swapping windows, all kinds of fun stuff.

Re: Yabai – A tiling window manager for macOS

#55
post #18

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…

I just bought this, but I don't see an option for automatic tiling?

Re: Yabai – A tiling window manager for macOS

#56
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]:…

It's amazing, makes MacOS usable when using big displays, I tried to use Yabai on my work macbook but couldn't install it due to SIP and work environment restrictions

Re: Yabai – A tiling window manager for macOS

#57
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]:…

Just wanted to point out that disabling SIP is not required to use most of yabai's window management features. You do lose some features[0] but I've found the only ones I really care about is focusing spaces, and you can create keyboard shortcuts for that in System Settings.

[0]: https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai/wiki/Disabling-System-I...

Re: Yabai – A tiling window manager for macOS

#58
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…

The name Yabai can also be used in a positive sense to mean "great", and is particularly common among young people. Source: https://web-japan.org/trends/buzz/bz0510.html

Re: Yabai – A tiling window manager for macOS

#59
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]:…

Fantastic app. Thanks for sharing. Already love it after 2 minutes.

Re: Yabai – A tiling window manager for macOS

#60

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…

That was my experience also especially the past year. I do programming and design and it seems many apps twist the ui api to do things that you can't naturally do in the interface and so Yabai, completely oblivious to it, will try to manage it and you have elements disappearing or appearing too large/small, behind other elements, etc. Even if you create exceptions, it seems things sometimes slip through the crack or start behaving unexpectedly. Flipping between native tabs for instance start throwing the tiling off for some apps that I use.

Yabai used to be pretty solid and usable, but I think with the author not using a Mac for his daily and with all the updates to the OS that he has to keep track of (and how some windowing Mac api are still blackboxed or not reliant to build logic atop of) it's only a matter of time before it gets into a poorer state.

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