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Comment by kelchm | Hacker News Reader

Completely agreed. I've owned a lot of laptops and other devices... There's no question at this point that the M1 MBA has become my all time favorite.

The only complaint I have is that you can't run two external monitors off of it, but I have no doubt that the next generation will address that.

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A lot of people will still prefer/need two monitors I’m sure, but if you haven’t tried an ultrawide yet I would encourage you to. I would always pick an ultrawide over two monitors.

Any recommendations on software to tile the display? One reason I like 2 screens is because things like maximizing or full-screening still leaves me with the other display for other windows.

A single ultrawide would be way better, if I could count on having 2 virtual displays within.

https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle works great for me!

Alternatively, there's a Hammerspoon package that supports this.

https://github.com/scottwhudson/Lunette

These bindings match Spectacle but you can map to Rectangle's instead.

I'm a big fan of Spectacle App https://github.com/eczarny/spectacle.

* Edit* Apparently Spectacle has been discontinued.

Rectangle I think is very similar and actively developed.

yep, I moved from Spectacle to https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai and it's amazing.

Still, it works perfectly fine on Big Sur, both Intel and M1 (in my experience).

While not a tiling WM, check if Divvy could suit your needs. You can set up hotkeys to resize windows to parts of the screen. The screen is divided into a grid.

I use BetterTouchTool for this, it lets you set up snapping so dragging the window e.g. to one side will snap it to half the width, as well as setting up keyboard shortcuts. It can also do a million other shortcut type things which I barely scratch the surface of, cool app!

Try Divvy. I mapped its hot key to option space and then you can just move the currently focused app somewhere on its grid.

https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai is awesome, way more extreme than the other stuff. But it's super configurable and I love how it auto fills windows (but you may not, which can be configured)

I love https://manytricks.com/moom/. Being available in the app store is a major plus from my point of view. And it has the usual tricks like keyboard shortcuts, etc.

Here's a bit of deep Moom lore.

For a 21:9 screen, the max grid size of 25 isn't good enough for me, I specifically wanted 36 so that I could make three 'panels' at 11-13-11 resolution.

Found out with a bit of emailing back and forth that you can by pasting this into a terminal:

    defaults write com.manytricks.Moom "Grid: Maximum Dimension Size" -int 36

The grid display ends up being a bit small but I only tinkered with it for long enough to make 1,2,3 assign to the grids, 4 and 5 assign to the left-and-middle and right-and-middle, and q w e, a s d, z x c to top-middle-bottom of each of the three panels.

I've been using "Magnet" for tiling. It's in the Apple App store. My use case, 15" laptop display and a 32" 4k display. I find it sufficient enough screen real estate. I sometimes think about getting an additional display but can't quite justify it.

I use Magnet too... simple to use, reliable, can't fault it.

I heavily use Moom for this. It's $10 on the App Store IIRC. It's absolutely fantastic and I would buy it again in a heartbeat.

I've been using Amethyst [0]. It works, is simple enough to configure and get started and has most things I need.

I found the default shortcuts to be the wrong way around for my cognition so I swapped them but otherwise it's been good. I mostly use the fullscreen (usually for the laptop's screen) and "3-column with main in the middle" layouts.

[0] https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst

If only Apple didn't completely nerf text rendering on non-Retina screens by removing subpixel antialiasing

I got around that by using Switchresx to supersample on non-Retina screens. It’s not perfect but looks better than jaggies

I was wondering why my brand new dell display looked like shit on my M1. Thanks for the heads up!

I love my 55" 4k curved TV.

Using a DisplayLink adapter, you can extend a second external display. Still silly these machines they can't do it out of the box.

Bingo. I do this. It's a little buggy every now and then, you lose unlock with Apple Watch and there is a small performance cost on one core of the system, but they just shipped a native driver too.

Compared to my coworker's 10 core i9 build with over 64GB of ram, my base model Macbook Air builds our node app in half the time.

Just be aware that DisplayLink uses the CPU to do this, so it will increase overall CPU utilisation, and you'll notice dropped frames occasionally.

I kind a like that I can run my primary display at 164Hz via dedicated Type-C to DisplayPort adapter. Too bad DisplayLink can't go beyond 60Hz on 2K screen.

There are also some frustrating bugs with USB-C / thunderbolt connections like the LG UltraFine 4K monitor that have been improved but not yet fully resolved. This isn't unique to M1, but does seem to be new to the more recent MacBook models (possibly related to the T2 chips).

As far as I know that's not a M1 MBA limitation, that's a M1 limitation. As the M1 pros also are limited to 1 monitor. Or i'm wrong?

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