spin2win VS RectanglePro-Community

Have you heard of Phoenix [1]? It seems relatively unknown but I actually found it to work better than Yabai in some ways. The gist is that it basically simulates a tiling wm and virtual desktops by internally tracking state. It's also highly hackable/extensible being written in JS. Spin2Win [2] is a config that's worked well for me.

[1] https://github.com/kasper/phoenix

[2] https://github.com/nik3daz/spin2win

That said, it seems there are no perfect solutions. At work where I can't really be futzing around with window management config I basically just use Raycast + hotkeys and try to keep everything inside maximized application windows. This means using Arc browser (tabbed), iTerm (tabbed), VS Code (with native tabs), etc mapped to cmd+1, cmd+2, cmd+3...Not much "tiling" going on but at least everything is pretty keyboard friendly.

Actually, if you're interested at all, I just, after literally months of reading about this, found a pretty sick solution.

Have you ever heard of Phoenix? https://github.com/kasper/phoenix/. Despite googling around for this exact topic, with 3.8k stars I had never heard of it. Apparently someone has created slim, JS scriptable interface that is basically tailor made toward creating your own tiling WM. I just installed it and loaded one of the examples: https://github.com/nik3daz/spin2win. And what it does is basically ignores the built-in spaces and creates truly virtual desktops by just hiding and resizing windows. And it works pretty well. The response time between switching "desktops" is basically instant.

There is pro version you can buy if you want to support the dev and get a few extra features.

https://rectangleapp.com/pro

Rectangle makes much more sense to me on Mac than a tiling window manager like yabai. I tried to use it but it just felt kludgy and I went back to Rectangle. Suits my needs just fine.

Rectangle Pro - Price: $15 (one-time purchase) Same as normal Rectangle, with throwing features, more arrangments, workspace setup for windows in any location you want and more.

There is... it's called Rectangle Pro! https://rectangleapp.com/pro

This started when I was unable to have apps appear on the correct monitor and in the correct shape / space. I played with a few window management apps and settled on Rectangle Pro.

Just curious, did you try Rectangle Pro? There are a number of features in it that are influenced by Windows, like mimicking the win+arrow keys, a snap panel that you can drag windows onto, and snap targets that act like fancy zones from Power Toys.

Swish is pretty nice, but Rectangle Pro is the best. The window throw feature in Rectangle Pro is faster and more flexible, and to me it feels more intuitive.

This is what Pro gets you.

FWIW, the functionality here overlaps a bit with some of the functionality that I have in Rectangle Pro.

RectanglePro a fully featured upgrade of the free app. Lots of different ways to configure window management but custom App Layouts is pretty impressive. You setup your app windows as required then you can save the config and reconfigure it with a shortcut. You can also create custom areas similar to BTT which can be activated from a Snap Panel which appear when you drag a window.

Rectangle Pro is their paid app, with is tuned for pros or something like that.