Amethyst – A tiling window manager for OS X

Is Moom any better than Spectacle?

Moom is by far the best I have tried, also. I really love that app.

FWIW, I'm a very happy user of bettersnaptool

For another option, I prefer Window Tidy. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/window-tidy/id456609775

Minus Mjolnir, I've tried the rest and still prefer Slate[1] but it hasn't been updated since Feb 2013. Actually I had never heard of Mjolnir before now. I like Slate's ability to define a config file that is just a little more powerful than the competition, plus it's easy to sync across machines. I haven't updated to Yosemite, but Slate works wonderfully on Mavericks.

[1]: https://github.com/jigish/slate

My preference at the moment is Optimal Layout.

http://most-advantageous.com/optimal-layout/

but, I haven't spent much time with Mjolnir.

I swear by Spectacle. After trying a number of other wms, this is the one I ended up using for more than a year now. It strikes a good balance for me between features and simplicity, and the keyboard shortcuts are intuitive and don't clash with other apps (like iTerm, Fantastical, etc).

The only one here I've been able to try was Divvy. Thought it was pretty useful in the pre-multidrag days.

Hyperdock is another

Have you tried TotalSpaces? It is my personal favourite so far, though I haven't tried all the others you listed, so would love to hear some other opinions on it...Thanks :)

Cool app, thank you. Trying it out.

Do you know if it's possible to have apps start in fullscreen (the real one, as in Yosemite) by default? I would like that as default and only tile on some spaces.

Just wanted to say that I liked your donation section. You don't often see one where someone says Here are some things that you'd might rather donate to than my project.

Is there a way to set up custom layouts? Eg, I'd love to have a variant of tall/wide-tall that puts the main area on the right side of the display, rather than the left.

I've had this idea for a while and I'm not sure if it's possible from your video. I have a code window, and ideally it would be next to everything: a documentation brower, a test browser, and a terminal. There isn't enough room for that.

It would be awesome if I could cycle through "spaces" that laid the same code window out next to multiple different things. Like maybe 1 is code | browser and 2 is terminal | code.

Possible?

Is there any way to turn off window shadows in OS X? Having the main window draw shadows over neighboring windows is really ugly.

How was your flight?

It is also very buggy around fullscreen apps, enough so that I stopped using it after a week. Slate et al worked much better for me (still slower than TWMs on linux) but forced or at least tempted more setup which is definitely the benefit of Amethyst.

When I had a linux machine I used i3 and loved it. After moving to OSX I search around for a solution and finally found Amethyst. Gave it a solid try for ~6 months or so but recently have moved to using BetterTouchTool with some custom key shortcuts for moving and resizing windows. I've found this works the best for my workflow. I would love to use a tiling window manager for OSX but in the end found Amethyst to be a little sluggish and, as mentioned elsewhere in this thread, buggy for full screen apps. I think ianyh has done an amazing job at working around a system that wasn't meant to be extended in this way, but that puts it at a dis-advantage right off the bat unfortunately.

To me the performance of XMonad detracts from the trope that Haskell isn't performant (which I've been hearing/seeing lately).

It's on the list of things I want to do. I should have used a tree structure off the bat and done something like binary space partitioning.

This is pretty much how I use my favorite tiling window manager on Linux: i3.[1]

There are occasions when tiling features come in handy, however (such as when you want to see more than one window at the same time).

[1] - http://i3wm.org/

I do this with trackpad swipes and a grid of desktops (using TotalSpaces2 currently). Each app or task has its "place". I've tried other stuff, but the spatial metaphor really works for me.

You are not. :) I don't usually use full screen mode for apps when my Macbook Pro is docked, but when I'm just using the laptop screen it's ended up being surprisingly useful. (At least I was surprised.) Docked I'm usually only using two virtual desktops, sometimes three.

Mission Control gets slagged on more than it deserves -- it's fast and functional. On point for the actual link to Amethyst: I use Moom for window resizing/control from the keyboard, but in practice the mouse is actually pretty darn efficient when what I want is to make a window this big and put it over there.

Who told you that? You could do it with just applescript if you wanted to, just need to enable accessibility so you can control windows and the mouse.

This is a woefully confusing decision on my part. There are actually two features: mouse-follows-focus and focus-follows-mouse.

The former just means the cursor moves along with window focus. So if you cycle to the next window clockwise, the cursor moves to the center of that window. Or if you focus a window on another display, the cursor moves to the center of that window. This makes it really convenient to do things like navigating between spaces on multiple displays as the display with the cursor is the one who responds to space switching.

The latter is probably what you're thinking of. You move the cursor and the window underneath it comes into focus. It's kind of experimental and still seems to be fairly buggy, though.

The "impossible" thing is that in OS X there is no distinction between the window that is focused and the window that is the keyboard responder, so the classic idea of focus-follows-mouse doesn't work. I haven't found the distinction personally very meaningful.

A feature matrix isn't a bad idea (and I opened an issue to track https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst/issues/267), but it's kind of hard to compare as they are such different pieces of software. Spectacle is manual window management and Amethyst is tiling window management.

Manual window management generally gives you better control and generally less overhead in terms of complexity. So it works well in the case of "I want to be able to move this window to the upper half of the screen", "I want to be able to make this window take up the entire screen", etc. You have to trade simplicity to get flexibility, though. What if I want to be able to move window to the upper right hand quarter of the screen? Or what if I want my screen divided into a grid of 3x4 and I want a window in the [0][1] position? You can accomplish all of those things, but you have to specify how to go about it, thus adding complexity. Slate, for example, puts that complexity upfront in writing a config file. Divvy, for example, puts that complexity at runtime.

Tiling window management gives you a more hands off approach. So things like "I want all of my windows to be laid out in this orientation, but I don't want to move them myself", "I want all of my windows to be visible at any given time", etc. You don't take actions to lay windows out, you just define algorithms for how they should be laid out and let the software sort them out. You have to trade simplicity to get control, though. Defining those algorithms can be complicated if you're not doing something really straightforward, and if you're not doing something straightforward it can sometimes be non-trivial to grok what's actually going on. Or you end up doing a lot of runtime massaging to get things working the way you want.

To each their own, though. I prefer tiling window management, I have coworkers who prefer manual window management. They're just different tools.

In a previous life I used http://code.google.com/p/python-windows-tiler/ for Windows. It's not the most stable application though.

Google led me to BetterSnapTool: https://itunes.apple.com/en/app/bettersnaptool/id417375580?m...

I personally use Cinch, which is good enough for me: Maximise if I drag a window to the top, left/right half if I drag a window to the side.

http://www.irradiatedsoftware.com/cinch/

So far I've never seen a tool which glued one window to the other though.

I've been using Zooom/2 for this for a year or two, and haven't had any complaints. http://coderage-software.com/zooom/index.html

Have you tried Optimal Layout?

http://most-advantageous.com/optimal-layout/

That's something I want to do. I want basically anything you can do with key commands to be possible via the mouse. Some of that comes out of the box with OS X, but some of it (like dragging to change layout parameters) is a bit trickier.

I use SizeUp:

http://www.irradiatedsoftware.com/sizeup/

It's a basic snap-to-grid thing. You have commands to send a window to any of the 4 quarters, 4 halves, or full screen, and to send the window to another workspace.

Seems to me that there are 2 big benefits over sizeup (though i'm basing this entirely on their website, i've not used it)

1 - With sizeup you have to manually move your apps around. With this, new windows are automatically tiled (and you can then move things around afterwards with the keyboard shortcuts)

2 - This seems like it supports more complex layouts (with various layouts built in)

You can probably run i3 in X11, although non-X11 apps won't work with it. Your best bet is to run i3 in a full-screen VM.

I researched this myself a few months back, since i3 was the biggest thing I missed when I had to switch to OS X (new company, new computer). Eventually I gave up and settled on Amethyst. It's not bad once you set up the keyboard shortcuts to your liking. The main things I miss are the tree structure for window organization, and window borders that stick together when resized.

I created some bounties on bountysource for features I'd like to see in this project. Hopefully other people want them enough to contribute as well, and ianyh will get a nice return on his contributions.

Well, Amethyst can float windows so I wouldn't call it a tiling-only WM, but there's a lot of reasons I prefer it over floating window managers.

I'm really lazy and want software to deal with my windows for me. I used floating window managers for a long time and found that I spent a lot of my time arranging windows in the same patterns.

I also found that with floating window managers were just too limited for things I wanted to do on a daily basis. Two come to mind off hand. I want to be able to make a window temporarily bigger, but keeping the other windows on the screen and sized appropriately and I want to be able to easily switch which window is the "primary window." When I'm doing web development without external screens I find it very help to have an editor and a browser window open at the same time. One of them takes up about 80% of the screen and the other takes up about 20% of the screen, but I switch which is which pretty often. Make the editor take up most of the screen, make some changes loosely referencing things in the browser window, make the browser window take up most of the screen and see effects loosely referencing the code in the editor. And sometimes I've also got a Hulu or Netflix window open taking 20% of the width and 50% of the height. The complexity of making that work with a floating window manager is just too much compared to how easy it is for a tiling window manager.

I also just like being able to see everything on my screen at the same time.

You can theoretically turn off window shadows. https://github.com/puffnfresh/toggle-osx-shadows

Yep, I like adding some space between windows.

I proposed something like that for spectale some weeks ago. Got refused. https://github.com/eczarny/spectacle/issues/290

I mostly use apps in fullscreen and sometimes need to see 3 /3 apps at the same time, then switch to fullscreen, then back to tiled mode again...

Small aesthetic gaps around windows may not be such a waste of screen estate.