noah VS yabai

The other day I came across an interesting "alternative" to WASM which gives you OS portability using fully native code, without CPU portability, the latter seeming not that big of a deal these days anyway as cross compilers have got quite good and there are only two CPU archs in wide usage anyway.

The idea is to simply run normal Linux binaries on macOS and Windows. How? You create a virtual machine using the Mac/Windows APIs without any OS inside, in fact without even any virtual hardware. It's literally just a new address space and some trivial min-viable VM configuration. Then you map the ELF binary and a ld.so into the VM with a minimal ELF interpreter, kick off execution and anytime there's a syscall you trap it and translate to the host OS syscalls. It can work quite well on macOS because the syscall interface is so similar.

Note that this sort of VM is not:

• A sandbox

• A hardware abstraction

Apps run this way hold all their data in the filing system of the host OS, they use the network stack of the host OS, etc. The VM is only being used to allow trapping and emulation of the syscall interface. The app isn't aware that it's being run in a special CPU mode on top of an emulated kernel.

Advantages: lightweight, simple, apps can use all CPU features, can run at native speed, the Linux syscall interface is highly stable, based on POSIX specifications and you can easily pick a subset of it to standardize.

Disadvantages: requires the emulator, apps exposed to missing features or quirks of the host OS e.g. Windows file system performance is much lower than Linux.

WSL1 sort of worked that way, albeit without the VM aspect that lets userspace apps do it. They abandoned it partly for performance reasons and users expected all existing Linux apps to just work. But WASM doesn't target existing apps. It expects developers to bend and do things the WASM way, and accepts that not all apps are compatible with it, so that's not necessarily a problem.

An example of how to implement this is NOAH:

https://github.com/linux-noah/noah/

There was an attempt, but it was archived https://github.com/linux-noah/noah

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.