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macOS window management without xmonad

Luke Barnard on August 01, 2018

When developing at home, I've "settled" for my MacBook Pro (circa 2012) and for the most part it's been OK. Having multiple "spaces"/desktops and t...
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Ryan Palo

You've probably heard of Spectacle for Mac, but, for anybody who hasn't, that's what I use for my window/space splitting. I like it because I can split and tweak the sizes quickly. It's not a full tiling manager, but it does what I need :)

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Luke Barnard • Edited

Spectacle looks like a simple alternative - easy to install and a GUI to change settings.

If only it prevented windows overlapping and handled macOS spaces.

Update: if you haven't seen it chunkwm and skhd is a really solid combination to achieve a very customisable setup (non-overlapping and handling of macOS desktops). It took me a couple of hours to set up something similar to xmonad and I'll probably write a post about that soon.

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Carlos Garcia ★

More love for Spectacle. After moving from Windows 10 a month ago I was missing its simple but effective window snapping functionality. Spectacle does the job. It's only missing mouse triggers, but there are so many keyboard shortcuts to make up for it.

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Austin Turner

Spectacle is a lifesaver, I am crippled without it.

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Salun Marvin

My favorite too. The first thing I do when installing macOS is install Spectacle.

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Matthew Orndoff

Yep. I use this as well. For me, MacOS is unusable without it.

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Artem Golovin
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Luke Barnard

Having installed those two as suggested, I'm really pleased with the result - it's much closer to xmonad but so much more flexible than xmonad.

I think I'll write a post about how to achieve near-xmonad experience with these.

Thanks again for the pointer, this should get more votes imo :D

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Artem Golovin

No worries, glad I could help!

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Luke Barnard • Edited

You've done the classic mixing of markdown hyperlink syntax. Also, putting "//" prefix uses the same protocol as the current page (http or https):

[chunkwm](//github.com/koekeishiya/chunkwm)
and
[skhd](//github.com/koekeishiya/skhd)

i.e.
chunkwm
skhd

(btw, the way I remember the order of the brackets is "squares before paren's" - it sort of rhymes and has not failed so far)

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Luke Barnard

chunkwm looks very very interesting, I will certainly give that a go. The key thing I notice is that it supports moving focus of windows and it looks highly configurable, like xmonad.

Thanks you for the suggestion!

(Also, this tutorial looks like a good place to get started, for anyone interested.)

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Templar++

2 terminals on one side, browser and editor on the other... because who actually needs to see more than 5 lines of code?

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Luke Barnard

If anyone is interested in following a project of mine that attempts to recreate xmonad's UX within any ANSI/VT-100 terminal, see nomad