Yabai – A tiling window manager for macOS
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Re: Yabai – A tiling window manager for macOS
#2Funny 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 requires restarting Yabai. This and other bugs happened frequently enough that it outweighed the benefits of Yabai. I'd be more than willing to try another tiling window manager on Mac if there's one out there that truly works. Related, I started checking out Stage Manager and it's pretty bad in my experience - obviously it's the opposite of a keyboard driven TWM, but I'm willing to try anything that helps me maximize the limited screen space I have. I'm all ears if anyone has had better experiences with other tools on Mac.
Re: Yabai – A tiling window manager for macOS
#3Funny 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 just use Grid, it already has shortcuts (I don't like that Yabai doesn't) and it's pretty easy to get used to.
Re: Yabai – A tiling window manager for macOS
#4Funny 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…
This may not be what you’re looking for, but I use Mizage’s Divvy on Mac & Windows and configure Gnome to match on Linux. It can be keyboard or mouse driven — I exclusively use custom keyboard shortcuts.
Re: Yabai – A tiling window manager for macOS
#5Coming from i3wm on Linux, I cannot use macOS without yabai. So glad that this exists!
Re: Yabai – A tiling window manager for macOS
#6In 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 natively.
Re: Yabai – A tiling window manager for macOS
#7https://www.hammerspoon.org/ is amazing. Not quite the same as Yabai but I cant live without it!
Re: Yabai – A tiling window manager for macOS
#8Yabai, and chunkwm before it, and kwm before that, are probably the most important pieces of software that fundamentally changed how I interact with computers.
I moved over from macOS to Windows and WSL full time back in 2020 and eventually ended up writing my own tiling window manager for Windows, which I never would have done had I not had the experience of using yabai on macOS.
I don't think it's a exaggeration to say that my experience with this one piece of software completely changed my trajectory as a software developer for the better.
Re: Yabai – A tiling window manager for macOS
#9Funny 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.
Re: Yabai – A tiling window manager for macOS
#10Funny 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 certainly run into my problems with Yabai and have had to work through different versions to solve problems. It's certainly not perfect still but I've found a pretty stable workflow for me. I would certainly recommend turning off anything that's not nessiary like window borders. After that you'll need special configuration for a couple problematic apps (Chrome for me), and lastly some custom behavior using the events to get the exact behavior I want. I have had to debug and look at logs to figure out my problems..