XQuartz VS yabai

brew install --cask xquartz

Or install from the project homepage [1]. Then just launch the X11 app. Note that it does require the application to be built for Mac - it’s not an emulator, just an implementation of the X11 APIs.

[1] https://www.xquartz.org/

I’ve recently spent some time working with terminal emulators in raw mode on macOS. While I chose to handle key events using escape codes, and found it seriously difficult (even gave up) to process the shift modifier key. However, I came across xquartz [1], which seems to do similar things as mentioned in the article. Would detecting shift key state have been trivial using such a library?

[1] https://github.com/XQuartz/XQuartz

The contents are rendered through gtk/cairo which not only goes through https://www.xquartz.org/ but also doesn't use GPU rendering (it was experimental 3 years ago, maybe better now). The main issue seems to be that neither Inkscape nor gtk people have much low level Darwin experts or time available to invest in debugging the whole rendering stack. See for example https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/issues/1614 and all the other referenced issues for all the gory details.

I live in a mezzanine studio using a M1 macbook for a workstation (writing/editing) and my old laptop with openbsd as a local server. I play music from that obsd server upstairs, which thus fills the whole room down to my desktop through the plugged-in speakers. My hosted library plays fine with mpd and ncmpcpp, and I just figured out it's not so difficult to use mpv to play streamed youtube videos, since firefox in XQuartz streaming from xenocara is way too slow anyhow.

There is an alternative: I ended up using Xquartz to give me an X11 environment and then running StumpWM as my tiling window manager. I used this for all my productive stuff, running full screen in MacOS, then a quick keypress got me back to the Mac environment.

I also used Xquartz. Emacs was better for me though because capturing text output and documenting what I captured was so much easier than X-window.

Link

I used a Mac for router software testing for over 20 years. I ran a shell on my mac either through Emacs (on occasion) or X-quartz with terminal connections to a dozen or more routers, linux and or Windows systems. In all that time, I opened the terminal on my mac maybe 5 times.

It exists! Check out [yabai](https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai), which is nicely paired with [skhd](https://github.com/koekeishiya/skhd).

I have a 49 inch CRG9 and the best recommendation for window management is Yabai (https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai) along with skhd (https://github.com/koekeishiya/skhd). Yabai is a greedy window management solution that tries to fit opened applications in given space and skhd let's you easily jump between those using keyboard shortcuts. This has massively improved my ultrawide experience.

Only disclaimer is, configuring yabai has a slight learning curve.

Want something free that's better than tiling on Windows? Yabai.

Here it is. There is no visualization of the stack, which apparently Stackline in the other comment supports, but I don't tend to need that. Just being able to move between the windows is good enough for me.

https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai/issues/203#issuecomment...

I use Yabai on my Macs without SIP enabled. Here’s a list of the features that absolutely require SIP to be disabled: https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai/issues/1863

But you don’t need to disable SIP just for tiling.

> there's still a ton of tinkering and tweaking you need to do to get Yabai really working correctly

This is pretty much true of basically every tiling window manager on Linux, too.

For me, using Nix-Darwin for MacOS and NixOS has drastically simplified my tiling window manager setup after initially doing the work to figure out my ideal config.

SIP is a feature that protects you from malicious actors with root (admin) access on your device. After they've encrypted your photos and drives and changed your passwords, it prevents them from making your machine unbootable by deleting or altering system binaries. As a side effect of this protection, you give up certain freedoms to customize your system.

https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai

For instance requires SIP to be disabled.

This is disproven by the fact that Yabai [1] can instantly swap spaces with SIP disabled.

[1] https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai

If you find the native window management lackluster (like I do), you can install a window manager like Amethyst, or yabai, veeer, or many others.