Window Manipulation Utilities | Hacker News Reader

Window Manipulation Utilities

wmutils.io

26 pointsbloat10 comments

If anyone should wander into this thread looking for Mac OS X equivalents, I thought I would note: Apple provides window-manipulation APIs via its Open Scripting Architecture (OSA). Previously that meant you had to use AppleScript for best results--I won't comment on AppleScript except to say that as of Yosemite, Apple treats JavaScript as a first-class OSA citizen.

This means, essentially, that one can write JavaScript window-manipulation scripts and run them with via shebang with "osascript". See here: https://github.com/dtinth/JXA-Cookbook

One can query an application's windows, then directly manipulate their position, size, and so forth in JavaScript.

I have some hacked-up stuff I use for my personal setup. I've found it works better for me than any of the other Mac OS X utilities for the purpose. Unfortunately I haven't extracted a common pattern for a general-purpose utility, but I can point people in the right direction if they want to roll-their-own.

Have you tried Phoenix?

https://github.com/kasper/phoenix

I realize it's not aiming for command-line manipulation, but I've found it helpful for doing keyboard-driven resizing and grid layouts just the way I want.

See also: Mjolnir: https://github.com/sdegutis/mjolnir

Hammerspoon is a fork that has enough community to keep the mailing list somewhat active. It sounded like Mjolnir might turn into the basis for a less low level, more polished commercial product, but there is little news.

Anyway, both use Lua for configuring OS level controls of the environment and user interface.

Yeah, I remember scripting most of my work with ruby, bash, and the Applescript libraries that were included in most OSX apps.

My other favorite is that all the menu items also participate in this bridge and allow you to do a lot more than just move windows around.

Is there an MSWindows equivalent?

(You can write your own window manager for the platform, and the existing one is highly extensible, but I've not seen this happen much apart from the occasional handy shell extension)

I'm using i3 window manager which allows as much and even more than wmutils.

For example, this simple script allows me for an instant assigning of workspaces to outputs on my dual monitor setup:

i3-msg "move workspace to output VGA1; workspace $1"

i3-msg "move workspace to output HDMI2"

What it does, is it moves current workspace from primary to secondary output and then brings up requested workspace on primary output.

The beauty is that by quickly requesting 2 workspaces I can immediately assign workspaces to both outputs. After some usage muscle memory kicks in and now I can instantly set up whatever I want on both of my monitors without even thinking or fumbling with mouse.

I like your style. I have started an open source project [recently](https://github.com/SacredData/COMPUTER) which allows users to execute such commands with voice commands. It's incredible that after all these years, window managers, even those as powerful as i3, still require users to think.

Slightly off topic, but somewhat related as I happened to ack "i3" on this thread.

I used to spend time configuring the hell out of xmonad and i3 until I realized that life is too short not to use a window manager with sane defaults while treating both the keyboard and the mouse as first class citizens.

wmii (for single monitor setups), cwm and dwm are good examples of that. Most mainstream desktops are also good.

Windows is excellent out of the box and the contextual file manager offers an unmatched experience across all operating systems.

OSX needs third party tools.

A WM in a Bash script? Sounds like my kind of heaven.

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