Tiling Window Manager For Macos

Apr 09, 2019 There are several Window Manager apps that you can use on Linux but just as you would expect, here is an article lists the best tiling window managers for you to choose from. I3 is a free, open-source, and completely configurable windows manager app targetted at advanced Linux and BSD users and developers. In computing, a tiling window manager is a window manager with an organization of the screen into mutually non-overlapping frames, as opposed to the more common approach of coordinate-based stacking of overlapping objects (windows) that tries to fully emulate the desktop metaphor.

The Mythical Engineer

Are you tired of dragging windows around and resizing them everytime you open or close an app in your workspace?

For the past several years I have tried numerous window management softwares like Moom, Spectacle and Rectangle.

I was using Rectangle since last year and was quite happy with the ability to move windows around quickly with keyboard shortcuts. I used to work on a multiple monitor setup, so it was easy to manage multiple windows and partitions on big screens.

I was working on Linux for a while and bumped on i3wm, which is a tiling window manager. The nicest thing about a tiling manager is you can control nearly everything from the keyboard.

It’s very quick and easy to set up side-by-side windows, and resizing one automatically resizes the other. It really helps on smaller screens, since by default everything takes full space on screen with minimal window decoration.

As I switched back to my 13” Macbook again, I felt the lack of efficient window management on macOS. I started searching for a solution and found this open source project Yabai.

I use most of my IDE and terminal in full screen now due to the shortage of screen size. Whenever I open an app, it splits the previously active and new window in half and after closing it, the active window restores to full screen in a snap. That saves me few extra clicks of resizing the windows again and again.

This has improved my workflow and increased my productivity a lot.

You can follow the steps below to quickly get it running on your system.

Step 1: Disable System Integrity Protection

Turn off your device
Hold down command⌘R while booting your device.
In the menu bar, choose Utilities, then Terminal

Reboot your system
Verify that System Integrity Protection is turned off by running csrutil status, which returns System Integrity Protection status: unknown / disabled

You can use this while SIP is enabled, but you’ll lose some cool features.

Step 2: Install Homebrew

Homebrew is a package manager for macOS. Similar to pacman on arch or aptitude on ubuntu

Open Terminal and run

Step 3: Install Yabai

Start yabai service

You will get a prompt to allow yabai accessibility permissions. You can navigate to Security & Privacy, then Privacy, then Accessibility.

Now install the scripting addition.

Restart Dock.app to load the scripting addition

Step 3: Configure Yabai

Create a configuration file and make it executable