If you are actually using tiling WM on mac, could you share which one and why?
You can check out my configs here [0] if you are so inclined, but it's not super polished.
You're better off just sucking it up and using the native UI until you get sufficiently familiar with it that it rarely gets in your way too much. Meanwhile keep lobbying your employer (assuming that you are being forced into this by your job) to support Linux for development workstations.
No matter how sophisticated these Mac Window Managers get, MacOS will always mess with the windows because it knows better than you. That's why people buy Macs, and it's not going to change. If you don't like this, then you actually don't like Macs.
It's opinionated, and it's opinions do not match yours. I would have liked window snapping, but instead we have 1/2 baked split screen virtual desktops.
I simply don't understand why people use them for development environments, the "Unix underneath" doesn't help enough in enough scenarios when it's hostile in so many others.
There’s at least non-fullscreen tiling available now if you hold down Option/Alt when hovering over the green traffic light (which also changes the corresponding Window menu items to “Move Window to (Left|Right) Side of Screen). There should probably be a toggle somewhere that makes this the default.
> I simply don't understand why people use them for development environments, the "Unix underneath" doesn't help enough in enough scenarios when it's hostile in so many others.
A lot of it is that the hardware is well-rounded and not as riddled with gambles/compromises as most other laptops are. Usually non-Apple laptops have at least one or two things that suck about them, with the most frequent being battery life, fan noise, and poor thermal design but include mediocre screen, bad keyboard, bad trackpad, bad power management, bad unplugged performance, bad port placement, and chintzy build among other things.
Some percentage of users also just like macOS as it is, though.
- it’s generally smooth and stable from a UI standpoint
- it has mostly sane defaults
- it has great font rendering
- the video and audio subsystems are rock solid
- it has access to every development tool I need daily via homebrew
It seems like there are generally two perspectives:
- “I shouldn’t have to change the way I want to do things”
- “I don’t mind changing to another way of doing things”
The first group I think has a harder time with macOS.
A while back I decided to experiment with only using the default first-party apps for macOS for everything, and it greatly changed the amount of OS customization I did from that point on. I still live in iTerm for most of the day, but I don’t really feel hindered by the OS in any way anymore.
From my experience Windows actively attempts to subvert my clear, authoritative commands, second guesses every admin instruction, interrupts me with focus changes and dialog boxes instead of giving the active window absolute priority (this happens sometimes with macOS, too), and comes with bloat right out of the box. When this developer thinks about a hostile OS, Windows 11 is rhe first thing that comes to mind.
Why bring up whataboutism? I honestly don't care that Windows is also hostile. It also has the worst implementation of virtual desktops. What has that got to do with MacOS also being generally terrible.
The rest of your comment adds nothing, as it just repeats what I said.
Used Yabai at first last time I was forced to use a Mac. Hated it with a passion. It was "close", but not close enough, and so I felt I was fighting it all the time.
Ended up running most applications full-screen instead, and relying on tiling in iTerm2 or the applications most of the time instead. It helped that I was connected to a second monitor most of the time.
That said, Rectangle works - in my experience - flawlessly and is an essential addition to Mac window management. It’s not as ambitious as a full TWM, but what it does provide (snapping, hotkeys, etc) is essential.
So like if I have windows in four corners, and focus is in the bottom left, I want something like ?-k ?-l to move focus up and then right. Now focus should be in the upper right window. Have I missed it? Does rectangle make this possible?
Amethyst (xmonad inspired) gets close, but I want directionality, not cycles within cycles.
So far my solution is to just use i3 on my desktop and have a bunch of ssh sessions into my macbook, which is fine until I do a clipboard-yank through the ssh session and wonder why I can't paste the contents into the browser on the linux side.
I tried both Yabai and Amethyst and, frankly, neither provide a clean experience.
Yabai requires disabling some OS security feature iirc, which may or may not be an issue for you. I seem to recall having issues with it, and switching to Amethyst pretty soon after. It might also only support BSP layout, which I dislike - stacks all the way.
Amethyst feels a little half baked. It works well enough, but configuration is through a GUI and saved in some non text format, making it not difficult friendly. It also doesn't support things like moving windows between workspaces, meaning you need to have additional bindings for that through the MacOS command center or whatever it's called.
Overall, I managed with Amethyst for close to 2 years, so that's the one I'd recommend of the two. Luckily I'm back on a Linux machine and can use river now. :)
Good luck!
It's been a while since I used Amethyst as the Mac is now on complete corporate lockdown, but I remember that being the biggest feature I used on Amethyst. MacOS doesn't support it, but Amethyst did.