Is there an auto-tiling window manager that just enforces tiling without using keyboard shortcuts? Like if I drag a window with mouse, it snaps it in a tile.
I think I saw this in popOS. Does yabai support this?
Yabai – A tiling window manager for macOS
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Re: Yabai – A tiling window manager for macOS
#72I 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 similarly find something like Yabai a bit too heavy-handed for my needs, and instead prefer Moom[0].
I find that I only need tiling occasionally, and for that Moom excels since it doesn’t add any new key shortcuts to memorize and is only ever visibly present when hovering your cursor over a window’s green button. Its Aero Snap equivalent is optional and turned off by default too, which is great for me (I trigger Aero Snap’s proposed-window-resize animations unintentionally often enough that they get to be irritating).
Re: Yabai – A tiling window manager for macOS
#73I 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 also use it and the free version is plenty for my needs
Rectangle is free and open source software, there are no strings attached that I know of
Re: Yabai – A tiling window manager for macOS
#74Funny 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…
try hammerspoon. it isn't a tiling window manager, per se - it's more of an all-purpose desktop extension framework. it is fully customizable, has a well-documented API, and a large community. for window arrangement the hs.grid component is plenty for me. see an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRJ0477KFp8
Check out https://github.com/agzam/spacehammer if you're using Hammerspoon.
Re: Yabai – A tiling window manager for macOS
#75Funny 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…
Magnet rocks. Very worth paying for. I hate using Macs without it
Re: Yabai – A tiling window manager for macOS
#76I 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]:…
Rectangle and Spectacle before it are really great for managing window placement and sizing. I wouldn't use a mac without it.
But I don't use a mac anymore. I use linux desktops and there's just nothing quite like Rectangle. For a long while, I used a tweaked fork of pygrid. These days I use wayland compositors and don't have a good option. I've been meaning to hack something together to work with floating windows on Hyprland but I never get around to it.
Someday I'd like to write something that does placement and sizing like Rectangle but snaps adjacent window edges together. Like if I have a bottom left window that's 1/3rd screen width and assign a new window to bottom right 1/3rd width, the bottom left would get resized to 2/3rd wide to fill the void. If I place a new window at bottom middle 1/3rd, the bottom left would get resized back to 1/3rd. If I resized bottom middle to 1/2 width, then the bottom left and right would each be resized to 1/4 width.
Hyprland has a plugin system that I believe would let me do this (someone has created an i3-like tiling plugin) but I don't have the skills or motivation to learn c++.
Re: Yabai – A tiling window manager for macOS
#77In 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…
On a 27” monitor running at 2560x1440 1x/2x tiling is better than on a small screen, but it still winds up awkwardly sizing windows from time to time. In most cases I find it easier to just let windows overlap, which results in the same information visibility but lets windows retain proper sizing.
I could see tiling working if I lived in minimal-chrome apps like Terminal and Sublime, but I don’t, and so floating with occasional tiling works better for me.
Re: Yabai – A tiling window manager for macOS
#78Funny 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…
Nothing out there quite works like i3 because they all politely ask the actual window manager to set the position/size of windows. i3 controls the position and size of windows.
Re: Yabai – A tiling window manager for macOS
#79I 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]:…
This sounds similar to BetterSnapTool, which I have been using happily for several years.
Re: Yabai – A tiling window manager for macOS
#80I guess that I just rely on MacOS layout, however random and not great, and use Moom with some hotkeys to handle the exceptions where I want 2 or 3 windows in a specific state.
I did try Yabai and Amethyst for a bit, but the overhead was a bit too much to handle.
What am I missing?