Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Yabai – A tiling window manager for macOS

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 223 posts

Re: Yabai – A tiling window manager for macOS

#81

Post by [deleted] »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #66
datameta wrote: post #64

Yabai is an interesting japanese word with several distinct composite meanings. https://www.alexrockinjapanese.com/what-does-yabai-mean-in-j... Here it is being used in one context at a beatbox battle between then World Beatbox champion Alexinho and the super innovative Soso. https://youtu.be/OjbYK4rujB0?si=SIn-uNHlh2KexsXc Yabai shout is at 3m23s

It also seems wholly unrelated to anything about this app though, which is a shame, because as someone who knows Japanese, I'm not likely to install something called "yabai" in the same vein that I'm not going to install something called "whoa" or "ohshit". Hopefully that puts me in the minority.

[deleted]

Re: Yabai – A tiling window manager for macOS

#82

Post by xwowsersx »

emoII wrote: post #15
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…

Rectangle is absolutely great

Rectangle seems nice, but not quite what I'm looking for. I want automatic tiling. I'm not looking to just move some windows around with shortcuts. I want to be able to have predefined arrangements and automatic tiling, etc. Rectangle is similar to SizeUp which I've used. Good for what it is, but still want a true tiling window manager.

Re: Yabai – A tiling window manager for macOS

#83

Post by poidos »

betamike wrote: post #57
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]:…

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...

That’s good to know, thanks for clarifying that!

Re: Yabai – A tiling window manager for macOS

#84

Post by pazimzadeh »

onelesd wrote: post #16
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…

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

I use hammerspoon with the ShiftIt spoon, which works well:

https://github.com/peterklijn/hammerspoon-shiftit

My config file:

https://gist.github.com/pazimzadeh/b1c70f5f205d0b63264e7c021...

Re: Yabai – A tiling window manager for macOS

#85

Post by poidos »

uberduper wrote: post #76
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]:…

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…

If you’re willing to use GNOME (and, I believe, KDE Plasma) you can set up keybindings that are a reasonable approximation to Rectangle. That’s what I did before i3 or on machines that can’t have i3 for odd reasons.

Re: Yabai – A tiling window manager for macOS

#86

Post by freeqaz »

betamike wrote: post #57
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]:…

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...

I want to echo this as well. I use a 2nd tool to help me add additional i3-like keyboard shortcuts as well (I have the ability to "stack" windows with Alt-S and rotate through them with Alt-J and Alt-K).

It's called skhd https://github.com/koekeishiya/skhd

I forgot where the script for the stacking is. I can look that up separately, but I'm on mobile atm.

Re: Yabai – A tiling window manager for macOS

#87

Post by asenchi »

jwells89 wrote: post #72
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 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 Ae…

Moom is one of my main tools and I have used it for years. It is one of the first things I put on my Mac. I use it constantly to move windows around, lay things out for work, and move things between desktops. I can't recommend it enough.

Re: Yabai – A tiling window manager for macOS

#88

Post by CSSer »

rxhanson wrote: post #49
CSSer wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You know, honestly I don't recall. From what I do remember, I had checked the repo and I believe it was something you were working on but it was going to require a really big lift. I wanted to be very charitable with you in my above comment. I used Rectangle for a decent amount of time and overall it was pretty great. I only switched because of a time/money consideration, not because of a vote of no confidence, which is not something I can always say. Keep up the great work!

Re: Yabai – A tiling window manager for macOS

#89

Post by Bagged2347 »

Erratic6576 wrote: post #73
teaearlgraycold wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There is pro version you can buy if you want to support the dev and get a few extra features.

https://rectangleapp.com/pro

Rectangle makes much more sense to me on Mac than a tiling window manager like yabai. I tried to use it but it just felt kludgy and I went back to Rectangle. Suits my needs just fine.

Re: Yabai – A tiling window manager for macOS

#90

Post by athorax »

tfsh wrote: post #67
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've used Yabai for about three years now, it generally only forgets windows or specifically their states if you use the swipe multi tasking features. However when this happens I have a keybind and Skhd command which quickly restarts the daemon [1] and fixes the windows. It takes a little while to get used it, but Yabai is now an app I can't live without. 1: launchctl kickstart -k "gui/${UID}/homebrew.mxcl.yabai"

I have the exact same setup, I have to maybe restart the service 2-3x a week. Unsurprisingly, outlook is often the culprit of needing to restart the service

# Reload yabai ctrl + shift + alt -r : launchctl kickstart -k "gui/${UID}/homebrew.mxcl.yabai"

Post reply on HN