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Kwm, tiling window manager for OS X
- wyclif 11y agoKwm requires access to osx accessibility. I know what they mean by this, but it's written in an awkward manner.
- mrits 11y agoOS X agglomerates functions like screen resizing and keyboard interaction under a silo labels "accessibility". I imagine OS X will prompt you to give access.
- wyclif 11y agoI know that; this is exactly what I was getting at when I said "I know what they mean..." My only point, and it's a small one, was that there's probably a better way to write this.
- sdegutis 11y agoAlso check out AppGrid [1], a window manager for OS X 10.9+ that uses vim-like keys to move and resize windows. (Keys are configurable.) See the Releases tab for a pre-compiled binary. I've been using AppGrid for about 3 years straight every day. [1]: https://github.com/sdegutis/AppGrid https://github.com/sdegutis/AppGrid
- sillysaurus3 11y agoScreenshots, gifs, and videos of this in action would probably help clear up some confusion.
- mkagenius 11y agoJust tried it. On the 24 inch monitor, I had 3 windows open and it perfectly tiled them. I used to use divvy and it was all manual, so this is great improvement. Plus one for auto focus. Note: In case someone is wondering, to give accessibility access, check the checkbox for terminal in the security and privacy --> accessibility settings
- RBerenguel 11y agoDid the keyboard shortcuts work for you? I can't get them to work (even tried adding some flags to check whether they are being caught or not and they don't seem to reach hotkeys.so's code, ever, for me)
- RBerenguel 11y agoNot sure which, but some app I had open (I simply closed everything) was trapping the keycodes somehow. Weird (and mildly disturbing)
- sergiotapia 11y agoSee also Spectacle: https://www.spectacleapp.com/ https://www.spectacleapp.com/ Maybe not the most configurable but in return you get something that works out of the box and doesn't require you to read 38 pages of README.
- hntuesday 11y agoJust wanted to throw in a mention of Slate (https://github.com/jigish/slate https://github.com/jigish/slate) in here while we're talking about different options. I've been a happy user for a while now. Haven't tried the others, though.
- gjcourt 11y agoLove slate, switched to it after ShiftIt went unmaintained a few years back, though it looks like ShiftIt is back in active development. Slate config is really nice, you'll feel at home if you are used to setting up vim or tmux configs.
- sergiotapia 11y agoSlate is the polar opposite of Spectacle. It's too much configuration for most people I'd say. I couldn't get it to work, and get back to my actual work in less than an hour so it was a non-starter for me.
- preek 11y agoI'm a long time user of a similar tool called Divvy[1]. However both these tools are _not_ tiling window managers. They help us scale Windows manually by providing customizable shortcuts. A tiling window manager would take care of that automatically. Popular examples are i3[2] and XMonad[3]. As a user of both Linux and OSX, having no access to a real tiling WM is probably the biggest downside to me from an end users perspective. 1. https://mizage.com/divvy/ https://mizage.com/divvy/ 2. https://i3wm.org/ https://i3wm.org/ 3. http://xmonad.org/ http://xmonad.org/
- stcredzero 11y ago
- noja 11y agoOn Linux and Windows I can make the current window occupy the left of the screen using Super+L, and the right side of the screen using Super+R. I rarely need more than this, in fact I find more than two or three windows distracting for most of my normal tasks.
- adolfojp 11y agoIn Windows 10 you can snap between 2 and 4 windows in custom sizes and if you snap two you can drag the separator and adjust both of their sizes at the same time. It's one of those great little features that doesn't get advertised enough in my opinion.
- tedmiston 11y agoSizeUp [1] (paid but inexpensive) does that well. They also make a version that uses cursor dragging instead of keyboard shortcuts called Cinch that I use daily. (I really wish they'd combine the two products for licensing purposes since they're 95% the same.) 1: http://www.irradiatedsoftware.com/sizeup/ http://www.irradiatedsoftware.com/sizeup/
- rahimnathwani 11y agoShiftIt will do that: https://github.com/fikovnik/ShiftIt https://github.com/fikovnik/ShiftIt
- to3m 11y agoAnother vote for ShiftIt here. I've been using it for a couple of years now, and I've found it fine for most purposes. Supports XQuartz+xquartzwm, supports multiple monitors, has configurable keyboard shortcuts. A few more options would be nice, though - I somewhat often want 3 columns in a row, for example, particularly on a 16:10 or 16:9 screen monitor. When I had a 10:16 portrait monitor setup I quite often wanted 3 rows in a column, too.
- nicolapede 11y agoIn Win10 you can also do Super+U (or Super+D) after either Super+L or Super+R to move the window into the upper (lower) right or left quarter.
- superuser2 11y agoI cannot give the binary access to OSX Accessibility because it is not an app bundle. It's greyed out in the System Preferences dialogue. Was anyone able to make it work?
- fit2rule 11y agoGive Terminal.app access, and launch kwm from the terminal ..
- jupp0r 11y agoThat is even more insane from a security perspective than the whole accessibility api in general.
- superuser2 11y agoYeah, no. I hope this gets posted again when it has an app bundle.
- jcalonso 11y agoWorth mentioning Amethyst for OS X, I've been using it for a year with a 3 monitor setup with no problems. https://ianyh.com/amethyst/ https://ianyh.com/amethyst/ and https://github.com/puffnfresh/Honer.app https://github.com/puffnfresh/Honer.app
- somebehemoth 11y agoI use Amethyst everyday and it is excellent.
- pmoriarty 11y agoHow does it compare to kwm?
- somebehemoth 11y agoI've not yet tried kwm so I am not really a good person to ask. In reading about kwm it seems to compare well to Amethyst in terms of features and use case goals. I've used Amethyst through several releases and seen a lot of improvement. If I had to make a real opinion all I could say is that Amethyst appears to be more mature (my assumption is that Amethyst has been around longer). I do like that the author reacts positively to feature requests and maintains a transparent development path: https://trello.com/b/cCg3xhlb/amethyst https://trello.com/b/cCg3xhlb/amethyst. All of this said kwm looks promising and I think it is awesome more people are using tiling wm's.
- to3m 11y agoIt's not obvious from the Amethyst page that it's open source: https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst (looks to be the MIT licence)
- abathologist 11y agoYes, the license is an MIT license.
- 11y ago
- AlphaSite 11y agoI've found iTerm2 2.0's built in split wind is blowing xcellent and covers 99% of the use case for this, and full screen split window covers another .9%.
- pi-rat 11y agoLong term amethyst user here, this looks really awesome. OUt of the box i feels much more like some of the linux tiling window managers and less like a hack.
- abathologist 11y agoDoes this mean you've installed and are using it? Does it feel more responsive?
- Saser 11y agoThis looks really similar to bspwm[1] for Linux, which also uses a binary tree for window management, and also uses a daemon/client model for interaction with the window manager. bspwm is by far my favourite window manager, in any OS I have used. [1]: https://github.com/baskerville/bspwm https://github.com/baskerville/bspwm
- farresito 11y agoI used to use bspwm, but ended up moving back to i3wm. While i3wm is not perfect, I always found it to be more practical than bspwm. The ability to stack, for example, is very nice. What's the thing that you really like about bspwm? As much as I wanted to really like bspwm, when it came to using it for work, I just found it lacked something.
- virtualwhys 11y agoCurious, what issues do you have with i3? Have been using it for a few years, really hits the sweet spot of easy-config + awesome functionality (stacked terminal windows with remote server load averages piped through title bar are a real nice-to-have for example). Floatable dock (i.e. scratchpad) is also pretty handy for skype, music player, notes, etc. Only issue that's really bothered me is a minor one: with stacked windows you can't get the desktop background to show through properly with transparency enabled (via Compton or other compositor). Apparently that's been fixed in 4.11. Anyway, no shortage of TWM options on Linux, everyone can have their (nearly) ideal setup ;-)
- cosarara97 11y agoWith i3, I never found an easy way to swap two windows at different levels of the tree. With awesome or bspwm, I can just mod+drag. Also, automatic tiling in various layouts is nice.
- farresito 11y agoI don't usually have complex layouts, and I really appreciate the stacking from i3, so in that sense i3 wins for me, but I guess if your layouts are more complex, you might appreciate bspwm power in that regard.
- mwill 11y agoThat screenshot is OS X? Anyone got any tips to achieve a look like that? I thought OS X customisation was basically dead.
- terkel 11y agoI would love to know that too!
- tHEbIgtHEb20 11y agoSomeone already mentioned this in a comment above, but here you go : https://github.com/koekeishiya/kwm/issues/8#issuecomment-166593294 https://github.com/koekeishiya/kwm/issues/8#issuecomment-166... I'm running something pretty similar, and it does look pretty good.
- bojo 11y agoIf you look closely it appears to be a fullscreen iTerm2 running a fancy tmux powerline. Edit: From https://github.com/koekeishiya/kwm/issues/8#issuecomment-166593294 https://github.com/koekeishiya/kwm/issues/8#issuecomment-166... "The Apple menubar is hidden using the option that was added with El Capitan. I'm using the program nerdTool to create the illusion of a bar that you see in the screenshot."
- PeCaN 11y agoI think that 'iTerm2' in the corner is just the name of the currently focused window.
- mariusmg 11y agoThat app is not a actual tile manager. Setting the window position is different from actual "tile management". Anyway for Windows a similar app is WinSplit Revolution.
- pmoriarty 11y agoIs there any way to ask kwm not to auto-tile windows, but rather keep them all maximized and one behind the other and with all their title bars visible by default? That's the way I prefer to use i3 on Linux, and it would be nice to find something like that for OSX.
- colindean 11y agoI'm a fan of Mjolnir: https://github.com/sdegutis/mjolnir https://github.com/sdegutis/mjolnir Hammerspoon is a less complicated fork of it: https://github.com/Hammerspoon/hammerspoon https://github.com/Hammerspoon/hammerspoon My config: https://github.com/colindean/mjolnir-config https://github.com/colindean/mjolnir-config
- hipjiveguy 11y agoI totally agree - Hammerspoon rocks! I'm using it to build both an Alfred/Clipboard/anysearch replacement, and a way to move the mouse around the screen using VI like keystrokes!
- dsdshcym 11y agoI tried almost every window manager for OS X. But due to the OS X itself. Some apps have the min window sizes constrain and can't fit in a small part of the display. They always go out side of the grid. This is the most annoying part. BTW I remember someone made chrome (or another app) running under fullscreen mode in a window. Anyone knows how to do that?
- drewg123 11y agoHow many of these OS X WM replacements are configurable to use a 3-button mouse + a keyboard key for window management shortcuts? I've used X11 for almost 30 years, and inherited a twmrc file at the very start which had the following mappings which have become muscle memory to me: alt + mouse_left = move + raise alt + mouse_middle = resize alt + mouse_right = iconify I've configured KDE to do this for years. I once tried switching to a mac, but between not being able to map the mouse buttons like that, and not having focus-follows-mouse. I ended up giving the Mac to my inlaws..
- jmgao 11y agoI got annoyed enough to write a tool to emulate this behavior on OS X: https://github.com/jmgao/metamove https://github.com/jmgao/metamove
- pfista 11y agoHere are a few more screenshots of it in action: http://imgur.com/a/tWBSg http://imgur.com/a/tWBSg
- cgatesman 11y agoI have been looking and hoping for something OS X like allSnap [1] for Windows where window sizing management isn't set up at prefixed sizes, but simply allows you to resize Windows as normal but they will snap to the sides of other Windows or screen edges. This allows you to nicely line up all your window edges with each other with little effort. [1]: http://ivanheckman.com/allsnap/ http://ivanheckman.com/allsnap/