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Comment by jcalonso | Hacker News Reader

Worth mentioning Amethyst for OS X, I've been using it for a year with a 3 monitor setup with no problems.

https://ianyh.com/amethyst/ and https://github.com/puffnfresh/Honer.app

I'd be curious to know how this software compares with Amethyst. I've also been using Amethyst for some time with no problems, but it is sometimes a bit sluggish. I have so far assumed this has more to do with unavoidable limitations in the OS X gui ecosystem. It is written in Objective-C, is available on homebrewa and has a binary distribution available, provides a gui configuration manager, and seems to include all features claimed by kwm—including focus follows mouse. But if I knew how the two projects differ and, in particular, what kwm provides (or plans to provide) that Amethyst doesn't, I might consider giving it a shot.

At a guess, I would expect kwm to be faster, but probably less far along than Amethyst in terms of features/stability.

It's been a long time since I've actually written any C++, but briefly looking through the code it looks like it's making some of the same assumptions I made that resulted in some strange problems like the dreaded fullscreen bug (https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst/issues/254). That said, some of those assumptions were made 3 OS X versions ago so things might have improved.

It does, however, look a lot lighter weight than Amethyst is, and it looks like it does a better job at aggressively caching. It also supports binary space partitioning, which Amethyst doesn't support yet (https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst/issues/255). If I'm reading it correctly, though, that's the only thing it supports.

All in all, it seems like a great project. We could probably learn some things from each other, and I expect both projects would be the better for it.

It's not obvious from the Amethyst page that it's open source: https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst (looks to be the MIT licence)

Yes, the license is an MIT license.

I use Amethyst everyday and it is excellent.

How does it compare to kwm?

I've not yet tried kwm so I am not really a good person to ask. In reading about kwm it seems to compare well to Amethyst in terms of features and use case goals. I've used Amethyst through several releases and seen a lot of improvement. If I had to make a real opinion all I could say is that Amethyst appears to be more mature (my assumption is that Amethyst has been around longer). I do like that the author reacts positively to feature requests and maintains a transparent development path: https://trello.com/b/cCg3xhlb/amethyst.

All of this said kwm looks promising and I think it is awesome more people are using tiling wm's.

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