It allows you to bind hotkeys to commands, much like Skhd. Hammerspoon is an incredible tool for automation.

This led me to look back to using one of my favorite tools on OS X, hammerspoon. To be super clear, one can still use yabai and skhd without disabling this feature, but not all features are enabled.

We’re unfortunately unable to snap to specific workspaces with hotkeys using Yabai, unless we want to disable some OS X security features. In addition to OS X’s default CMD + arrow, we can move workspaces as well. Notice how we map all our hotkeys in our skhdrc, this allows us to recreate most of the functionality our i3wm-gaps would grant us, including moving focus between windows, moving windows, making windows fullscreen, and much more. yabairc and skhdrc, take a look at both of these files. Once installed, one configures these two programs by writing configuration files. _I’d recommend adding yabai and skhd to one’s Brewfile, which I explain why that’s so important in my Brewfile post. By using Brew, one can easily install these two programs. Yabai is a window management utility, while Skhd is a simple hotkey daemon tool, and together they’re are very powerful and customizable. Christian walks through how we can leverage yabai and skhd together to recreate a pretty big portion of i3wm-gaps. I’m incredibly grateful to have found Christian Bargmann’s blog post on “So you want i3wm on MacOS?. Since I’m now using OS X, due my new company issuing Macbook Pros, I began hunting for an i3wm gaps equivalent on OS X. I am a huge fan of this and unfortunately is not matched on say Windows or OS X. So one can say run Ubuntu and boot into a Gnome desktop environment, or a KDE environment or even an i3wm gaps environment, all with having the save backend Ubuntu powering their environment. Linux has a lovely feature where it separates the desktop environment from the operating system backend. Unfortunately, my favorite tiling window manager i3wm gaps, does not work on OS X. This not only includes tiling window managers, but also tools like tmux, and customized keyboards that have more ergonomic key setups.

Overall, anything that allows me to use a computer without using the mouse, is a big plus in my book. If you’re unaware of what a tiling window manager is, check out my previous post on tiling window managers.Īs some of you might know, I’m a big fan of tiling window managers.

Macos i3 window manager