nixos-configs VS yabai

Recently switched to Hyprland (a Wayland tiling window manager) on NixOS. It's beautiful! As a former i3 user, I'm very happy with it. It looks really nice out of the box (especially compared to i3's default appearance) and has a lot of very interesting features.

I especially enjoy Hyprland's implementation of special workspaces, which allows me to hide specific application windows and summon them on-demand with a keybinding.

My Hyprland config is here for anyone interested: https://github.com/heywoodlh/nixos-configs/blob/master/roles...

This is what I use for my home lab running NixOS:

https://github.com/heywoodlh/nixos-configs/blob/d5b0ffbcc4cb...

This script is so nice because it's so simple: it follows the journalctl output of sshd.service and then sends a push notification to me through Gotify's CLI (I just need to remember to setup gotify when I setup my server). The best part is that it's so easy to modify this script for ANY systemd service that is using journalctl.

I alert on all successful and failed attempts, because in my home lab, I should be the only one logging in -- so I don't really get notifications unless I'm working on something. It's helped me a few times when I've accidentally left port 22 exposed to the world on some VPS' -- reminding me to add firewall rules to reduce access.

I use NixOS+GNOME+pop-shell for tiling windows on Linux, and I love it!

I am quite frequently on MacOS, and I use Yabai[0] and skhd[1], managed with Nix-Darwin for tiling windows and custom keyboard shortcuts. With how I make my Linux and MacOS builds look and feel identical it's pretty easy for me to forget when I'm on one vs the other.

For anyone curious, here's my repository for deploying my configs[3]. It's awesome to have one source of truth for managing NixOS servers and workstations, MacOS workstations, and other Linux workstations with Nix installed.

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

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

[2] http://daiderd.com/nix-darwin/

[3] https://github.com/heywoodlh/nixos-configs

I really like NixOS (I just barely distro-hopped away from NixOS back to Arch). One reason I switched away is because similar to my i3 setup I would find myself tweaking my actual desktop/system more than getting work done. Mostly because I haven't sat down for a few hours to become more familiar with Nix's declarative language -- but I kind of don't Nix's language and think it is far from intuitive for me.

For reference, here's my nixpkgs repo (galaxy-chromebook is my most recent config): https://github.com/heywoodlh/nixpkgs

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.