homebrew-bundle VS yabai

I maintain a Brewfile (https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-bundle) which contains the majority of the non-project specific applications that I like to install on any new Mac:

https://github.com/jonahgeorge/dotfiles/tree/main

What's really nice is the `cask` & `mas` keywords allow you to install .dmg files & directly from the App Store.

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While its not included in there yet, I've been experimenting with maintaining a private Homebrew tap which contains my ~/bin directory as opposed to shell aliases.

> It's strange that people are so against declarative systems, or even file-based OS configuration. When I get my new Macbook I was up-and-running within a few minutes. I can't imagine maintaining a list of brews I need to re-install just to set up everything + my configs + everything else.

I haven’t had time to try Nix yet, but HomeBrew does have a declarative-ish workflow that I’ve been using for years:

[Brew Bundle](https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-bundle) let’s you have a plaintext file listing all packages you want installed on your system. Add a line for stuff you want installed, delete a line for stuff you want removed, invoke it the right way and it will install/remove packages until your system matches the list. The initial list can be generated by “brew bundle dump” or something like that.

For configuration, I find that a normal dotfile repo cloned into my ~/.config (with a script that maintains symlinks to config files in e.g. ~/Library) works well enough for my use.

Brew supports dumping installed things into a brewfile: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-bundle

I was using text files before as well to manage it.

Assuming everyone's on a Mac, I'm actually surprised there isn't that much use of something like homebrew-bundle[1]. It's definitely nicer to have your tooling run natively rather than, say, trying to wrap everything in Docker, or trying to get everybody on board with nix or guix.

I think the only real issue here is that you can't really pin to specific versions unless a formula exists, and there is no guarantee that a formula with a pinned version will stick around because homebrew likes to stay lean.

[1]https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-bundle/

You should checkout Homebrew bundle and create a Brewfile instead. That will let you install both stuff from brew, casks and Mac AppStore apps in one go.

If you use brew bundle and create your own Brewfile, you can store this with your personal dot files and automate bootstrapping (auto-installing all your system tools) a new or recently reformatted Mac by including auto-trader-pro in your Brewfile.

And if you're already loving Homebrew, definitely check out Homebrew Bundle!

If you like homebrew, definitely give homebrew bundle a whirl if you haven't already

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.