Looks super interesting. Has anyone here tried a keyboard-first tiling window manager on macOS? Any recommendations?
For me it's pure speed at getting to where I need to go. My notes live on workspace 1, my main workspace on 2 and browser on 3, so I'm just a single key combination away from most of what I need. Can still alt+tab if I like.
If that doesn't feel useful to you, then maybe a tiling wm isn't right for you. That's entirely fine.
My wm has an "escape" in that I can define floating desktops, and by default I have one, mostly used for file management, because there are things where I agree it's better to have floating/overlapping windows.
It doesn't really matter if it's a "waste of space" - I have two large monitors, and 10 virtual desktops to spread windows between (I'd add more, but I haven't felt the need). To the point where my setup, by default, centers the window with large margins when I have just one window open on a screen because it's more comfortable (and I'm just one keypress away from fullscreening the app anyway).
Most of the time I use tiling because I like not having to care about the layout beyond those defaults.
But I can also configure specific layouts. E.g. I have desktop dedicated to my todo list, a list of done items, and notes, and it has a fixed layout that ensures those windows are always in the same placement, on the same desktop.
In my day to day I have a couple terminals (each with 4-5 tabs, some are running screen sessions), two browsers (with max 3-4 tabs open), music player, at least 2-3 IDE's open (JetBrains), Notes, mail client, Slack. This is across two monitors.
It's quite the opposite.
My laptop has a small 11.1'' screen, so using a traditional desktop with smaller windows is not practical for me. Plus, not having the windows overlap with each other by default gives a more structured workflow.
unrelated to the comment: I wrote this answer 3 times, but the damn process killer on Android kept deleting it so I had to re-write it each time. if I sound mad, it is because I am.
Thirds, quarters, sixths. Move windows to the next screen. Increase and decrease size.. so many nice things you can do with just the keyboard.
Its keyboard shortcuts are so deeply in my brain I could rattle them off while operating heavy machinery :)
AeroSpace is almost there, it has a few quirks and annoyances and is missing some features but it's close enough that it's now my daily driver for client work requiring being on a Mac.
Highly recommended and hopefully it continues to evolve. Also hoping that the churn in macOS is not going to kill it for some unexpected reason.
As far as Hyprland, I tried it and when I got to a setup that I felt comfortable I realized that I had basically replicated my Sway setup with no added benefits so I just switched back to Sway. I'm not much into ricing anyway. I mostly want the chrome to stay out of my way.
That said, for people unfamiliar with i3/Sway, Hyprland could be a great way of getting into tiling so I'm definitely rooting for them!
AeroSpace tiling window manager finally changed my work day from constant struggle to only occasional struggle with macOS. I use it with sketchybar which is not yet perfect, but it could become quite good and performant with some work on it.
I currently use Gnome on Linux, not a tiling window manager, and I would gladly go with Hyprland, but about a year ago while I was trying it out, it crashed quite a few times so it clearly was not ready for production use back then. Will give it a shot again.