alt Hacker NewsI 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)
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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.
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).
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
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.
for ghostty users check out https://ghostty.org/docs/help/macos-tiling-wms
Aerospace is incredible.
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
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.