Hacker News Reader

Comment by tra3 | Hacker News Reader

this is cool, I love multiple options on macOS.

What’s the difference between this and yabai or aerospace?

After playing with it for all of 30 seconds, my thoughts are: 1. It's ridiculously fast. Not that it matters that much, Aerospace is fine for me. 2. I somehow doesn't require any accessibility permissions... so it "just works" after running the CLI... 3. One thing I immediately noticed, is that it looks like moving a window to be accordion can be done in the same workspace?

So far I'm very impressed... not sure if I'm impressed enough to switch yet though... but being in rust does make it slightly easier for me to contribute

yabai uses native macos spaces and generally requires sip to be disabled to have a good experience(windows can't be moved between spaces without)

rift is essentially aerospace but implemented in a yabai style. yabai style meaning using low level, private apis and generally focusing more on performance. whereas aerospace prides itself on only using one private api.

usage wise, aerospace and rift both use a virtual workspace system where all of your (work)spaces are in one macos space so no red tape has to be cut in order to move windows from ws -> ws and so forth

Does rift handle native MacOS tabs like the ones ghostty and finder use? I might give it a shot. I have been having a couple of issues with Aerospace lately.

Same. That's the worst part of Yabai

No, rift also has problems. For example, if I have Calendar on the left, and Finder on the right, and I open a tab in Finder, then it looks like it works.

However if I close the 2nd Finder tab, then Calendar maximizes below Finder.

Also I am wondering if you could estimate how difficult it would be to implement something like Niri? I much prefer the scrolling style tiling, but none of the MacOS WMs seem to be going that route (other than PaperWM.spoon which is not for me).

I'm pretty new to Mac and didn't know Paper had a port, what isn't to your liking?

Just not a fan of this just being a Hammerspoon thing instead of a proper WM.

to answer both comments: i've been working on a way to handle tabs but it's hard to find a solution that isn't half-baked due to the lack of info on tabs given by the os (there are no events or anything, just on a11y attribute that give info on tabs)

as for a scrolling layout, its possible, but does not fit that well with rifts layout, even thought you can get something similar using trackpad swipes to switch between workspaces

Aerospace readme says they have a solution for tabs in mind based on their big refactor.

Haven’t looked into what this looks like, but understandable that it hasn’t made its way to rift yet. I will be trying out rift and report any issues on Github.

https://github.com/karinushka/paneru does that

Interesting, thanks for sharing. My only concern is that it seems to use native MacOS workspaces which Aerospsace and Rift actively avoid. MacOS workspaces are hell to deal with, so I don't think this is for me.

I'm using aerospace. If I'm fine with performance, does rift provide anything else?

Same boat, but vs amethyst. It's worked very well for me the last few years.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com