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Comment by flurie | Hacker News Reader

I like that the author points out a number of great default shortcuts in macOS, but I find it hard to beat the combination of yabai[1] and skhd[2] for the best keyboard-driven workflow. In the absence of these, I would be more inclined to try either Hammerspoon or Karabiner-Elements. I also find Phoenix[3] intriguing, but it's probably too much work to get it to where I'd want it for daily use.

[1] https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai

[2] https://github.com/koekeishiya/skhd

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

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If this seems like too much configuration overhead for anybody else, check out amethyst[0]. It's UI driven and configured similarly to xmonad- which is more opinionated than some other tiling WMs

I liked i3 when I was a linux user, but since I've switched to Mac I've tried to use tools with UIs and opinionated configuration

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

I did not mention Amethyst despite liking what it does because it is what I'd call "begrudgingly configurable." It will let you configure it, but it would rather you didn't.

The trade-off is that yabai is instead annoyingly configurable, and its set of sane defaults is just okay. The only way I've found to mitigate this is by browsing yabairc/skhdrc files on github. I steal whatever looks good, and I keep it if it works well for me.

Yeah Amethyst does that, but for >80% of setups the default layouts are good enough once I get used to it. And custom layouts is coming to Amethyst!

that can be a pro or a con depending on the way you look at things!

For linux systems, I like fine grained configuration. For Mac though- I don't like it. I own so little of my system on a Mac that I don't want to maintain custom tooling, given that I have little control over the systems these tools interact with.

I found yabai to be a little buggy when I moved over to an M1 Mac from an Intel one. Haven't tried it for a few months now so maybe it's time to hop back in. It's an amazing piece of software if you're used to some of the TWMs available on Linux, it made the transition into MacOS much more manageable.

There was a recent major release that added in M1 (and Monterey) support. A few of us have been using it since the beta a few months back. It works at least as well as it did previously, and it feels much snappier now.

Curious to hear if you use Yabai with system integrity protection enabled and if so, what features do you lose?

Yabai's wiki has a list of the features you'd lose:

https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai/wiki/Disabling-System-I...

I use it with SIP enabled and haven't had any pain points.

Neat! Thanks for sharing.

What version of macOS are you running? From the instructions it seems you can re-enable it after with no negative effect on High Sierra, though I assume you’d still lose those features on newer versions.

> focus/create/destroy space without animation

I'm amazed by how painful I find this.

I can't disable SIP on my work laptop which means I'm forced to "sit through" the macOS animations as I switch between desktops. Feel like I've wasted hours of my life watching desktops fade-in/-out.

If only this attitude remained:

"Well, let's say you can shave 10 seconds off of the boot time. Multiply that by five million users and thats 50 million seconds, every single day. Over a year, that's probably dozens of lifetimes. So if you make it boot ten seconds faster, you've saved a dozen lives. That's really worth it, don't you think?"

https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Saving_Lives.txt

I now run it with SIP enabled on my work machine, not by choice, and I didn't find it made a huge difference. I think the only major thing I lost is easy app movement across spaces, but that is mitigated somewhat by having pre-defined spaces for things I use a lot, such as browser, editor, mail, calendar.

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