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Comment by xz18r | Hacker News Reader

I see yabai mentioned, definitely check out Aerospace. Ive tried multiple WMs after years of i3 on Linux and this is the best one I found (for me) with quite a margin. It just works (tm)

https://github.com/nikitabobko/AeroSpace

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I love aerospace, but you can definitely feel that it's a hack on top of the macos window manager. If a window starts misbehaving (like, app is frozen or sometimes even just has a top dialog) then aerospace can't move it and you lose its immersive aspects. I also keep getting floating windows lost in the outer limits of the outside wotld, and have to use the native "move to center" in this situation. Oh and that issue with tabs in ghostty or item is annoying - but once again not something aerospace is really responsible for.

With all that said, short of being able to use i3, this is a fantastic WM, couldn't imagine not having it. Use it in combination with karabiner to remap your caps lock key, and suddenly caps lock becomes how you move in macos.

I was a heavy macOS Spaces user. Upon a recommendation to use Aerospace from somewhere else here a few months ago, I switched and love it. I considered Yabai, but some features required disabling SIP (System Integrity Protection).

Aerospace makes my Mac usable, but it is a looooong way from what i3 offers in my experience. i3 is way snappier, super stable, with good features out-of-the-box (including a status bar) - you forget it exists. Aerospace is slow, has to use that "windows in the corner" hack, it constantly resets whenever I resume the mac from sleep, needs additional tool for a status bar and more.

Much of it is not a fault of Aerospace, it's just what you get using Apple products in a non-sactioned way.

Another happy aerospace here! IMO it does a great job with barely any configuration required (the default config works great, I have barely tweaked it over years of use), that said I’m not exactly power user of tiling WMs, I have one app per workspace 90% of the time

Same here. My only complaint is I wish there was a way to make apps floating by default and then you would specify which ones you want tiled.

IME a lot of apps are easier to use in their default state. I really only use my web browser, text editor, and terminal in tiled mode.

When exactly do you need floating windows?

- a happy ion2/i3 user since forever -

When you want to quickly use apps without navigating away from your tiled workspace.

Especially transient dialogs, e.g. wifi/file picker. I would create rules in sway/i3 for those to keep them floating.

I've written at length about this topic on HN in the last month, so I'd hate for it to seem like my lil hobby horse, but something I've come to appreciate about the conventional "stacking" window solution of Windows/macOS is that it has a good answer for apps you briefly use.

You got me thinking, and this seems to work for me. I didn't test if the order of these blocks matters.

    [[on-window-detected]]
       if.app-id = "com.github.wez.wezterm"
       run = ["layout tiling"]

    [[on-window-detected]]
       if.app-name-regex-substring = '.'
       run = ["layout floating"]

for ghostty users check out https://ghostty.org/docs/help/macos-tiling-wms

The main reason I use Aerospace (after a thorough testing of most macOS third party window managers) is for the space management and instant space switching.

Aerospace is incredible.

Another happy Aerospace user here!

Also paired it with sketchybar!

It worked great when I switched from yabai some time ago but now it seems to be constantly losing windows and I have to keep resetting it :S

Matches my experience. I've been resorting to `Window > Move & Resize` in the menubar to get those rogue windows back which is faster than restarting but still quite annoying...

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