Give https://rectangleapp.com/ a try if you want a window manager that can place your windows around the screen nicely.
Happily donated to the author of an app so essential for my day to day productivity to show my gratitude for making it and making it open source. If the author happens to read this: thank you!
(This is sarcasm.)
You can tile two windows. :-)
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204948
But yeah, I use Recrangle for my macOS tiling. I use it all day, every day.
Would love something that worked more like Pop!_os’ tiling, or perhaps i3’s.
It works for me at least. I have Moom installed for the occasions where I temporarily need tiling and that’s more than enough. Full tiling WMs on Linux give me a headache because with most of the programs I use, windows need to take up 70%+ of the screen to be usable which means the remaining space for other programs isn’t particularly useful, which defeats much of the purpose of full tiling.
Worst philosophy ever. Instead of figuring out how new technology enables better solutions to current problems, their philosophy is to emulate current solutions instead.
This is why I prefer gmail over outlook, and Linux over macos.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2010/09/macos-x-beta/14/#b6
That's an old article, but Siracusa is still complaining about the "new" non-spatial finder to this day.
All tied to global keyboard shortcuts too. Free, open source, and does exactly what you've asked for.
After getting into professional dev during / after high school I ended up using Divvy for an OSX window manager. It wasn’t fantastic, but I could set up custom keybinds and it was “reminiscent” of those tiling WMs I found so much love for as a pre-adolescent.
I recently (2ish years ago) switched from mac to a Debian then eventually Pop OS setup for my daily driver development environment. While not as robust as a custom arch setup with a tiling WM like awesome, Mutter is quite good and everything PopOS offers out of the box has been fantastic. Perhaps one of these days I will find the time to dive back into arch and configure a _truly_ efficient and customized workstation / dev env :-)
It’s interesting to see all of these alternative, perhaps even _better_ / more robust / more FOSS friendly mac WMs being listed here. I’m keen on giving them a try whenever I end up back on a mac workstation, but I cannot deny that my Divvy lifetime license has served me incredibly well for years, with support through many big OS upgrades.
I switched to it after having some issues with rectangle sending some of my windows into the abyss (way outside of the screen) which forced me to kill the app and restart it to get it back. But if Rectangle works for you that's good too, it's probably easier to configure.
I've been using TotalSpaces 2 (https://blog.binaryage.com/totalfinder-totalspaces-future/) to change workspaces in macOS without the annoying animation which you cannot disable.
Too bad TotalSpaces 2 does not work with Monterey or M1 macs, so I am really looking for another solution that can enable this. I used to run skhd + yabai, but something about that did not click as good as with TotalSpaces 2.
Anybody know a solution for Monterey & M1 that you can use to switch between workspaces with the keyboard, without any delay ?
Seems there would be demand for such software based on the comments. For me at least TotalSpaces 2 has really changed how I use macOS, hopefully they will get it working on M1 & Monterey.
I have a feeling the problem of making it work was a bigger one than they expected, version 3 has been in the pipeline for a LONG time.
I've been using a Samsung C49RG9x (49" ultra-wide) on Windows 10 for about four months. It was absolutely the right move to shift from 2 or 3 1080p monitors to a single 49" ultra-wide unit.
Now I've switched back to using my 2020 13" MBP, and thus macOS, as my work horse. Long story short I had to use a previously bought "CalDigit Thunderbolt Station 3 Plus" (a dock, basically) to get the monitor to work correctly. This is because macOS cannot correctly render to the monitor over HDMI.
I don't know why this is (because I don't really know much about displays or display protocols - I don't care to neither) but I tried a few cables and adapters and it gave me an odd resolution (3840x1080 I think) and a pink tint over the whole display.
The CalDigit "dock" solved this as it exposes a Display Port (1.2) option to the Mac. The moment I plugged in the dock and then plugged the monitor into it via Display Port it worked flawlessly.
That being said I still had to go into the display settings in macOS and change the resolution from "Default for display" to "Scaled". It's at that point you can choose the correct "5120x1440" native resolution for the monitor.
I believe I'm getting a 120Hz refresh rate too.
I've been extremely happy combining the ultra-wide with macOS and using Rectangle (which replaces FancyZones on Windows 10 for me) to "tile" windows all over the place.
I hope this was helpful.
They are the best window managers I've used on MacOS, because the resize features work flawlessly every single time. Other ones I've tried (e.g. bettertouchtool) have occasional issues with that.
They'd be perfect if they supported full customization of drop zones. They have some limited customization, including via the command line, but it's nothing compared to some of the other apps that are out there.
The custom shortcuts in Hookshot are beyond what I've seen in most apps, especially since you can customize what happens in repeated executions of the custom shortcuts. Let me know what other apps out there have the customization that you are referring to.
BetterTouchTool goes a step further, and lets you customize the drop zones. I.e., if you drop a window on the top left, it snaps to your custom top-left position:
https://docs.folivora.ai/docs/104_snap_areas.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtgOseyyJ5U
Hookshot's performance is great but AFAIK doesn't let you snap windows to custom areas without keyboard shortcuts.
Disclaimer: I made this.
hs.hotkey.bind({"cmd", "alt", "ctrl", "shift"}, "F",
function() hs.application.launchOrFocus("iTerm") end)
I also use Karabiner-Elements to change capslock to cmd, alt, ctrl, shift.