Comment by montebicyclelo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by montebicyclelo | Hacker News Reader

Valid points in the article.

Slightly related: I feel it's worth spreading the word about yabai [1], a tiling window manager for MacOs. I've been using it for >1 year, to get an i3 like experience, and find that it makes using MacOs very pleasant.

Issues in the article are somewhat addressed:

> Focus Follow Mouse

Can do this with yabai

> Always on top windows

Can do this with yabai

> Window snapping

Can do this with yabai

The way I use it: I have 9 desktops, and can switch between them via the keyboard (ctrl+<desktop_number>). Can move apps from one desktop to another via keyboard commands. Apps are automatically resized to fit. Can move apps around on screen via keyboard commands.

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

I’ve not used yabai as I now have the option of using Linux for work, but I’d tried several tiling WMs for macOS a few years back and none that I tried handled adding/removing displays well.

When you plug in an external display, do windows move over to it? And if you change the resolution on one display when doing so, do the windows resize as they should?

It seemed at the time like their reliance on macOS’s accessibility settings to manage windows made them fairly limited.

I use an external display, but with mirroring on, so I can't answer your questions from experience. Looks like there is some support for external displays: https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai/discussions/238#discuss....

> reliance on macOS’s accessibility settings to manage windows made them fairly limited

I think that yabai goes a bit deeper than other MacOs WMs; it gets you to disable (or partially disable) MacOs's system integrity protection, so it can use the OS window manager directly.

I'd like to try it but seems like it doesn't do much without disabling SIP, which I'm reluctant to do on my work laptop.

This was my thought. Yabai totally changed my setup for the better.

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