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Comment by wyclif | Hacker News Reader

I use a MBP now, but I've never understood why a lot of macOS users seem to be happy doing that. Back when I was on Linux, I preferred how easy it was to use i3 or awesome or whatever WM would tile the windows so all the screen real estate maxed out according to the work layout I preferred at the time.

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macOS' window management is still so remarkably bad. In fact it might even be worse than ever for me now; I used to be able to install some kind of "keep window afloat" hack, but the ability to do that disappeared with one of the version updates. I just try to keep everything in tmux these days and avoid the UI altogether.

You should try Slate (https://github.com/jigish/slate), it's great for window management once it's set up. I have hotkeys for positioning windows top-, bottom-, left-, and right halves, move windows to the right or left monitor and for displaying a grid that let you define the size and position of the current window by marking an area in the grid. It needs the Accessibility API, though, which may be an issue if your employer doesn't allow sudo access on their computers. Here's my dotfile: https://github.com/Jonasmst/dotfiles/blob/master/.slate

Or if you want something with zero set up, use Spectacle https://www.spectacleapp.com/

Thanks, I hadn't heard of this and it's an interesting project. One problem, though, is that if you're like me and a heavy user of iTerm2/tmux, Spectacle seems a bit jittery while it's trying to match the terminal window to the desired window dimensions.

Or if you want something close to i3, try https://koekeishiya.github.io/chunkwm/

Or if you want to write your own WM from scratch, try https://github.com/Hammerspoon/hammerspoon

There are a handful of nice window management tools, and chunkwm is a filing window manager for macOS

Perhaps not everybody is obsessive about "maximizing space" in this diminishing returns regard?

The fact that Divvy is so popular makes me suspicious.

I acknowledge that - though I'm being presumptive and calling that "failing to maximize tool effectiveness."

I have to stay organized because I have a dumb and chaotic brain. If I used the default osx windows management, er, "system" such as it were, I probably would get done a tenth of what I get done today on my Gnome setup.

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