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Comment by adamnemecek | Hacker News Reader

What do people use for Windows-like window management on macos? I tried a bunch of them and I'm not a fan of any of them.

I actively dislike the notion of spaces.

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I'm a bit reluctant to draw attention to my solution since it was written to scratch my own itch and I have only had a handful of users other than myself. Last year I was seriously thinking about making linux my dev choice because coming back to a machine that had slept left me with several minutes of reorganizing the windows that had jumped to various spaces as the multiple monitors were recognized. Aerospace could put them consistently somewhere but it couldn't distinguish windows of same app. I built WinPin for that use case but then kept going to solve other things that have made using a Mac with multiple screens and dozens of windows that need to be organized around my workflows easier. I built in support for workspaces but really haven't used that myself since spaces were more of a necessary evil to organize windows rather than useful in themselves. Interestingly to make WinPin truly useful you have to turn off spaces because I can't figure out a way using what Apple gives me to determine which space a window is in.

If anyone would like to try the app out (https://winpin.app) I'm pretty confident that downloads and update flow are working and it has been running without issue for me on multiple macs for the last 4 months. There are a lot of edge cases I'm sure I haven't seen yet, but it has truly changed my workflow and I'm interested to see what others think. Please don't try to purchase a key, it is fully functional without one. I'm still working on that with Polar.sh and want to make sure my t's are crossed and i's are dotted. Gotta be one of the weirder posts to HN since I actively do not want to sell you something right now.

Rectangle with Alt-Tab (both open source), the latter is especially useful as I hate macOS' application- rather than window-level switching, Alt-Tab returns it to Windows-like behavior.

I use https://rectangleapp.com/ and enjoy it. I have shortcuts to move windows to the left/right half of the screen, and cycle between monitors. This, combined with native cmd+tab and cmd+` is enough for me.

This doesn't answer your question, but Aerospace (tiling WM) has been good for me to not use spaces. I don't mind spaces in theory, but the slow animation, for whatever reason, just really irks me.

Contexts app is perfect for win-like alt-tabbing https://contexts.co/

I use the r+cmd app for deterministic app switching.

Caps mapped to right command.

Karabiner to map dual-cmd+jkl; to mapped vertical slice so j is left quarter, j+k is left side, etc.

dual-cmd+i moves windows between screens and dual-cmd+u rotates current window through full, top half, bottom half.

The whole thing is deterministic and super fast and gives me more permutations than I'll ever need.

My Cmd-TAB frustration is I'm usually moving the mouse while I press it, causing the mouse to select some unwanted app. It doesn't help that the row of apps forms a solid bar across the center of my display.

Wish I could ignore mouse movement when the app switcher is displayed.

Aerospace with opt+key to go to that space, cmd+opt+key to send a window to that space, then just make a mental map of where everything is. I use mnemonics like always putting discord on workspace "D" so it becomes quite fast

What do people use for Windows-like window management on macos? I tried a bunch of them and I'm not a fan of any of them.

I actively dislike the notion of spaces.

What do people assume Spaces is a Windows thing? It was on Unix systems decades ago.

Every [*] macOS user uses Rectangle.app — https://rectangleapp.com

The ones who don't use it is because they don’t know it exists.

Or they are still using the (deprecated) Spectacle.app — https://github.com/eczarny/spectacle

[*] if you wonder why I say “every user” even though it’s obviously not true is because everyone loves hyperbole in this website.

I can prove everyone doesn't love hyberbole because I have found a counterexample, but I cannot prove everyone doesn't use Rectangle.app.

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