MacOS Folks -- chunkwm is dead, yabai is the future (same dev, too!)
tldr; chunkwm has been completely rewritten and is now yabai
From the chunkwm site:
chunkwm is no longer in development because of a C99 re-write, yabai.
yabai was originally supposed to be the first RC version of chunkwm. However due to major architectural changes, supported systems, and changes to functionality, it is being released separately. There are multiple reasons behind these changes, based on the experience I've gained through experimenting with, designing, and using both kwm and chunkwm. Some of these changes are performance related while other changes have been made to keep the user experience simple and more complete, attempts to achieve a seamless integration with the operating system (when possible), proper error reporting, and yet still keep the property of being customizable.
For those who don't know, chunkwm was / is a tiling windows manager that is sort of like bspwm / i3 etc. I've been using chunkwm for a few months now and love it. If you're also an i3 user, the lack of a proper super key does make your key combos different, but overall its an excellent window manager. Both chunkwm and yabai use koekeishiya's Simple Hotkey Daemon (skhd).
Anyway, I gave the new version the day and its pretty good, but still has some quirks. It seems like development is moving along quickly, so keep an eye on it.
I've been meaning to give a tiling window manager a try in macOS for months now. I was excited, but then I saw:
This is a 100% non-starter for me. I'll turn it off occasionally when needed, but I refuse to operate with this disabled day-by-day.
Is Amethyst or anything else out there any good? Should I just try out chunkwm, despite its deprecation?
Yeah, on High Sierra SIP can be reenabled, at at this time with Mojave, SIP needs to stay off.
https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai/issues/13
As for chunkwm -- definitely give it a swing. Its such a joy to have a decent TWM with MacOS. I've tried the others, but they all seem somewhat limited with their splits. With Amethyst I couldn't figure out a way to have three windows on the left with one main on the right. It's silly, but this layout is my go-to.
The other tiling window managers mostly stick to sides and corners, and don't offer a true TWM experience. So far chunkwm (and eventually a stable yabai) is in the lead.
It took some time to setup again (it doesn't seem that long ago that I had to move from kwm to chunkwm!), but this seems like an improvement over chunkwm. Some edge cases and general flakeyness were never really fixed with chunkwm, this seems much more solid. Some features like monocle mode are missing, but I still think this is already going to be my daily driver.
yeah, its pretty good. I don't doubt that we'll see something like monocle on in the near future -- though, there might be a way to do it with
--grid. Couldn't figure out how to float specific applications, but overall I'm really impressed with it so far.I really wish we could have an independent
Superkey. I've got caps set toHyper, but things like resizing windows would really benefit from an independent key. I find I'm always juggling combos, trying to find something that isn't already used.