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Comment by jkcorrea | Hacker News Reader

If you're a stickler for keeping your windows neat and orderly like I am, you may want to check out Yabai (+ skhd):

I used to use BetterTouchTool and Stay to do this, but after a co-worker tipped me off on yabai+skhd, I've been extremely pleased and rarely have to think about window placement (took me a while to get the config "just right", of course).

I haven't tried it on Big Sur, but because of the way yabai can assign windows to spaces, I don't believe you'd face this issue.

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I use a combo of phoenix [0] and displayplacer [1]. displayplacer is used for making sure my monitors are arranged correctly and I wrote a small script in phoenix (that I bind to a hotkey) that moves all my windows into the right spot, as well as keybinds to resize my windows for tiling purposes.

It's not perfect but it works pretty well for me, I'll have to look into yabai some more, it seems interesting.

[0] https://github.com/kasper/phoenix

[1] https://github.com/jakehilborn/displayplacer

As a developer who makes an app that specifically places windows on external displays, i have to disagree with you(r level of confidence). MacOS's APIs have become unreliable on external displays in 11.0.1

I hate the fact that this needs to be an additional purchase and not part of the core OS. Windows and most Linux desktop environments are years ahead of macOS in terms of managing window placement. It doesn’t feel like macOS has advanced much in that department since it’s initial release in 2000 yet Windows has snapping, easier tiling, less glitchy multi monitor support....and this is coming from someone who hates using Windows!

I really wish Apple would give their core OS a little TLC. These days Apple feels more like 90s/00s Microsoft with the continuous chasing of shiny new things rather than fixing any of their existing tech.

> Windows and most Linux desktop environments are years ahead of macOS in terms of managing window placement.

I don’t understand. Windows has no ability to remember window positioning on screens to the point where I dread undocking my laptop because of the wasted time spent rearranging everything. The same way I dread it when Windows goes to sleep.

What version are you using? I haven't had any of these issues for a long time with Windows 10. I also have some weird configs going between an external monitor upstairs and a KVM-based setup in my basement office.

I love using HammerSpoon for this sort of thing. Not for the faint-hearted to get to a point where you're happy with the configuration, but it's a total Swiss Army knife for scripting just about anything on your system, from window placement/moving to changing DNS or proxy settings when connecting to different networks, to preventing sleep, etc. It pretty much does the job of 15 other tools I might need to install otherwise. Yeah, you need to learn Lua (easy), and be willing to invest a bunch of time in it initially for setup, but once you have done that, you won't want to go back!

I am currently using Yabai without disabling system protection as my company would not approve of disabling system protection. I wish many of its features were possible without it. It's _better_ than nothing, but it's still pretty bad without disabling it.

It looks like yabai (mostly) works on Big Sur: https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai/issues/589

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