spin2win VS miro-windows-manager

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.

For basic window tiling, I stumbled across Hammerspoon and the MiroWindowsManager spoon.

https://github.com/miromannino/miro-windows-manager

https://www.hammerspoon.org/

After trying yabai, Amethyst, and many others, I landed on hammerspoon.org + https://github.com/miromannino/miro-windows-manager a few years ago and haven't looked back. I couldn't live on a Mac without hammerspoon tbh.

For windows management:

Install this https://www.hammerspoon.org/

brew install —cask hammerspoon

Then follow the instructions here to install this:

https://github.com/miromannino/miro-windows-manager

Absolutely awesome. I’ve been using BetterTouchTool for windows management for years but I just started using Jump Desktop on my iPad for remote connection to my Mac and it wouldn’t work at all. Decided to try out hammerspoon today after hearing good things and it is amazing. Never going back to BTT for windows management.