I used AeroSpace over yabai for the tiling window manager because I didnt wanted to compromise on SIP which is a mac security feature. It is supposed to be keyboard first like omarchy to move windows organize workspaces etc The setup runs around 157mb of ram and consists of AeroSpace, Karabiner (for the super key), and five small self build swift binaries.
I am running it daily on my M1 max macbook, currently on macOS26. I havent tested it much on other macbooks or macOS versions. The install script creates a manifest file to backup what was installed before and what it installed itself, the uninstall script takes that into account to clean up the macbook to exactly the state it was in before. It needs quite some permissions for it sfunctionality which I layed our in the project readme. I wanted to be really transparent about which permissions it uses and for what reason.
I would love to get some feedback or see people trying it out and hearing your opinion. Mostly about what still doesnt feel smooth in the experience or if you find any performance issues.
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
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.
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.
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.
Actually one of my peeves with Linux is that as of yet, there’s no WM or DE for Linux that gets even 80% of the broad strokes right for people who find a traditional Mac style desktop productive. Most options either lean Windows-style or minimal tiling style, with the only outliers (GNOME, Pantheon, COSMIC) representing the odd niche of a small handful of macOS fundamentals hybridized with conventions from the tiling things and Windows.
For those of us who do enjoy it, it's great because a stock install is already 80% of the way to a productive setup. I can have a new Mac ready for work in 15-20m without copying dotfiles or anything like that.
Not that there isn't a place for tinkering and customizing, but it's not the computer(s) that I get work done on. It's for leisure time machines. When I try to work under Linux I end up on side quests trying to fine-tune everything to perfection (which is for practical purposes impossible, unless I write an entire desktop environment for myself) and can't get any work done. On a Mac most things are already configured the way I like and the things I can't I shrug and then focus on my work.
Well, I'm not "the defaults" person - there isn't a single piece of software that I ever installed and didn't have to configure later, except maybe some CLI tools. To me, that's the point of "soft" in "software" - it should be malleable. Not everything has to be of the Emacs level of extensibility, but I should be able to change things to extract maximum utility out of it. I don't "tinker" for the sake of it - I make changes for performance and execution.
I squeeze both Linux and Mac environments to their utmost possible scriptability. Bootstraping a Linux box from scratch for me is a matter of minutes. I wish I could say the same thing about Macs - there are tons of things you just can't easily change from the command line, it's a long cycle of - click, open, navigate, click, browse, confirm, click, logoff, reboot, etc. And it's simply annoying. It feels like needless ceremony for the "cybersecurity theater" or whatever. And the 80% of opinionated pre-made things to make you productive is just bullshit - like for example, the very first thing I always do on a new Mac is that I run:
defaults write NSGlobalDomain KeyRepeat -int 1
defaults write NSGlobalDomain InitialKeyRepeat -int 9
I suppose I should be thankful for not having to deal with Windows. Which is way worse.
If this had existed last week, I’d have saved a few hours, but it was a kinda fun few hours and now it’s all mine. Glad to know I’m not the only one on this particular quixotic quest.
What korren repo? it doesn't even exist under your github user anymore...
The shortcuts I made are really close to omarchy's shortcuts, because that's what I got used to now.
I guess the most important one is super + k. It gives you an overview about all shortcuts so you don't have to guess or dig through config files.
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.