Kind of sideways rant about tiling window managers on Marcos in general..
I mostly use Linux + dwm as my daily driver, recently added a mac into the mix (mostly for testing personal cross-platform stuff, I use macs for work mostly), and not being a fan of the macos UI in general decided to set up a tiling window manager - googling showed me AeroSpace and Yabai as the most popular options.
The experience with both of these has been quite terrible, and I don't think the problem is with these projects themselves but with macos and how it's UI/desktops work. Full screen windows seemingly break both completely. Doc hiding/showing is completely inconsistent - sometimes it just renders on top of all windows and doesn't hide other times it stays hidden even on mouse hover. Windows just disappear and can't be switched to. Fullscreen tiling seems completely unsupport(ed/able) - you must waste screen space on pointless title/status bars for some reason . After googling it turns out many of these issues exist in a fresh/bare macos and have been know unfixed issues for like 5+ years.
I can't believe there are people claiming macos has a consistent, elegant and high quality UI... it is so terribly shitty and broken
Yeah its a bit painful on mac. You cant have floating windows constantly in front on mac like you have on hyprland. In my implementation I added a super + s shortcut to pull any floating windows I lost to the front again. But its definitly not the nicest solution.
For fullscreen windows I also added a custom implementation with super + f that works in the workspaces setting. Just making videos fullscreen or clicking the green fullscreen button still exits the setup to macos fullscreen. The system is still kinda usable with mac fullscreen in parallel but its not a clean experience.
MacOS is so absolutely terrible for programming work. The only coder-favorable unit on Mac that I wish Linux had a similar alternative for is the OSA layer. Nothing else is justifiable there from a software engineering standpoint. Nothing.
Apple keeps insisting on Jony Ive's influence and keeps making "an operating system for florists". Well, I'm a damn programmer - I need the utility, I don't care about stupid animations, widgets, jumping icons in the Dock, etc. If my enterprise overlords didn't push it so hard down my throat, I would be so much happier just using Linux.
Hey thanks, I will try to get the readme more human. I am not a great writer and I wanted to have each piece explained well and in detail. Especially about the permissioning and different features. Looking forward to your experience hope you area gonna like it.
Just a tip - Don't worry about not being a great writer. Trust is earned, and making AI write everything will guarantee most users won't give your project a sniff whatsoever
Offtopic but not really: does anyone know the minimal fix on how to remove the animation between changing "desktops" in Mac OS? I want it to be instant, no slide animation. Please and Thank you
This setup switches instant. But on default MacOS I think the only thing similar is Accessibility > Display > Reduce Motion. But I think it doesnt remove it just makes it shorter. I am not aware of any other way.
Yes this is based on AeroSpace, I used it with some custom configs and hidden commands for the tiling. This project is more about combining it with the custom menu bar, mission control, shortcuts and a few other things to get a well rounded experience.
Great work! I'm a fan of the hyprland setup on Omarchy and also daily on Mac! Do you have any screenshots showing some of the tiling, apps running and what not? Looks excellent!
Yes there are 4 screenshots in the readme, it's a bit long and most of them are in the bottom.
There is a plain desktop one, one for the shortcuts help menu, one tiled one and one for the custom mission control. They are in the docs folder in the repo it you just wanna check out the screenshots.
How would this work on the dual monitors? Is there an option to have a secondary monitor have just one workspace while main monitor has multiple workspaces?
Currently I use it on two monitors, both have independent 1-9 workspaces and you can move your windows across them with shortcuts or by dragging. On my big monitor I mostly just use the first workspace.
When you plug the monitor out it collapses the workspaces and tries to fit them on empty ones on the Mac screen. It remembers the previous setup to restore them once you plug the monitor in again.
Hyprland deserves the credit, not Omarchy. https://hypr.land/
Thats true, my bad hyprland is definitly what makes omarchy work so well. I should have stated that in the description.
Kind of sideways rant about tiling window managers on Marcos in general..
I mostly use Linux + dwm as my daily driver, recently added a mac into the mix (mostly for testing personal cross-platform stuff, I use macs for work mostly), and not being a fan of the macos UI in general decided to set up a tiling window manager - googling showed me AeroSpace and Yabai as the most popular options.
The experience with both of these has been quite terrible, and I don't think the problem is with these projects themselves but with macos and how it's UI/desktops work. Full screen windows seemingly break both completely. Doc hiding/showing is completely inconsistent - sometimes it just renders on top of all windows and doesn't hide other times it stays hidden even on mouse hover. Windows just disappear and can't be switched to. Fullscreen tiling seems completely unsupport(ed/able) - you must waste screen space on pointless title/status bars for some reason . After googling it turns out many of these issues exist in a fresh/bare macos and have been know unfixed issues for like 5+ years.
I can't believe there are people claiming macos has a consistent, elegant and high quality UI... it is so terribly shitty and broken
Yeah its a bit painful on mac. You cant have floating windows constantly in front on mac like you have on hyprland. In my implementation I added a super + s shortcut to pull any floating windows I lost to the front again. But its definitly not the nicest solution.
For fullscreen windows I also added a custom implementation with super + f that works in the workspaces setting. Just making videos fullscreen or clicking the green fullscreen button still exits the setup to macos fullscreen. The system is still kinda usable with mac fullscreen in parallel but its not a clean experience.
>you must waste screen space on pointless title/status bars for some reason
There is macwmfx: https://github.com/aspauldingcode/macwmfx
I use it on a couple specific apps to remove title bars. You can inject it with DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES.
this is really cool perhaps I could integrate it or get some inspiration from it to declutter the tiling view
> rant about tiling window managers
MacOS is so absolutely terrible for programming work. The only coder-favorable unit on Mac that I wish Linux had a similar alternative for is the OSA layer. Nothing else is justifiable there from a software engineering standpoint. Nothing.
Apple keeps insisting on Jony Ive's influence and keeps making "an operating system for florists". Well, I'm a damn programmer - I need the utility, I don't care about stupid animations, widgets, jumping icons in the Dock, etc. If my enterprise overlords didn't push it so hard down my throat, I would be so much happier just using Linux.
Okay very cool, will try. But please remove the claude-ese from the GitHub repo. It just erodes trust.
Hey thanks, I will try to get the readme more human. I am not a great writer and I wanted to have each piece explained well and in detail. Especially about the permissioning and different features. Looking forward to your experience hope you area gonna like it.
Your writing is 100x better than Claude writing
Just a tip - Don't worry about not being a great writer. Trust is earned, and making AI write everything will guarantee most users won't give your project a sniff whatsoever
Offtopic but not really: does anyone know the minimal fix on how to remove the animation between changing "desktops" in Mac OS? I want it to be instant, no slide animation. Please and Thank you
i have this installed and its amazing! https://github.com/jurplel/InstantSpaceSwitcher
This setup switches instant. But on default MacOS I think the only thing similar is Accessibility > Display > Reduce Motion. But I think it doesnt remove it just makes it shorter. I am not aware of any other way.
AeroSpace is really nice for i3 like tiling on macOS https://github.com/nikitabobko/AeroSpace
Yes this is based on AeroSpace, I used it with some custom configs and hidden commands for the tiling. This project is more about combining it with the custom menu bar, mission control, shortcuts and a few other things to get a well rounded experience.
why doesn't YC fund products like this ?
Hard to monetize I guess, omarchy and hyprland are also public domain and just build out of passion, like this project.
Great work! I'm a fan of the hyprland setup on Omarchy and also daily on Mac! Do you have any screenshots showing some of the tiling, apps running and what not? Looks excellent!
Yes there are 4 screenshots in the readme, it's a bit long and most of them are in the bottom. There is a plain desktop one, one for the shortcuts help menu, one tiled one and one for the custom mission control. They are in the docs folder in the repo it you just wanna check out the screenshots.
thank you!!! I missed that sorry
No worries, curious if you already see things in the screenshots that could be improved.
How would this work on the dual monitors? Is there an option to have a secondary monitor have just one workspace while main monitor has multiple workspaces?
Currently I use it on two monitors, both have independent 1-9 workspaces and you can move your windows across them with shortcuts or by dragging. On my big monitor I mostly just use the first workspace.
When you plug the monitor out it collapses the workspaces and tries to fit them on empty ones on the Mac screen. It remembers the previous setup to restore them once you plug the monitor in again.