whkd VS komorebi

in powertoys, find a feature called “keyboard manager”. if you want to go deep into keymapping in windows, checkout autohotkey and whkd

It was only when I started writing my own sxhkd-inspired hotkey daemon[1] for Windows that I really started to appreciate just how _good_ AHK is. Even just for hotkey binding, AHK does some incredibly clever stuff very transparently to provide for such an excellent end-user experience. For example, using system hooks automatically when the user tries to bind a hotkey combination that is reserved by the system (usually win+something) is implemented so well. Really excellent software and I miss it when I'm using Linux or macOS.

[1]: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/whkd

I ended up using AHK for komorebi[1] because I was still new to Windows when I start writing it and I didn't wanna have to write a tiling window manager AND a hotkey daemon. I even ended up generating a nice little AHK library to wrap around CLI commands that sent socket messages to the window manager to make it easier to write a configuration.

Ultimately the syntax changes make it impossible to fully reproduce the same library for AHKv2, which is being installed by default on all mainstream package managers now.

I ended up biting the bullet and making my own hotkey daemon[2] for use with komorebi based on skhd[3] and I haven't looked back since. This will be the "blessed" hotkey daemon recommended for use in the next release of komorebi.

I'm still using AHK (v1) for the stuff that it's good at (and there is a lot of stuff that it's good at!), but ultimately I've found that it's not the right tool as a hotkey daemon for a socket-based tiling window manager.

[1]: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi

[2]: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/whkd

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

I love seeing whenever this is (re)posted.

This article had such a huge impact on my life and led to me creating many pieces of software[1][2][3] that were hyper-specific to myself and my needs at the time, which also later found an audience in others who think and work in ways similar to me.

[1]: https://notado.app - a "content-first" internet bookmarking and highlighting service which has been my second brain since 2020 after growing frustrated with Instapaper, Pinboard and Readwise. Eventually I expanded this to allow for RSS feed publishing on specific topics in an attempt to solve the "firehose" problem when following other peoples' bookmarks/shares, and at the end of last year I added what is now my most used feature of image generation from highlights for sharing on image-first/text-hostile social media platforms.

[2]: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi - tiling window manager for Windows. There wasn't really anything fit for purpose on Windows when I started, and I was too spoiled by bspwm and yabai on Linux and macOS that I just had to write something before I could become a truly productive Windows user. I'm astonished that this now has 50k+ downloads.

[3]: https://kulli.sh - I use this to aggregate comments from HN/Reddit/Lemmy/Lobsters on an article I'm interests in in one place to read. This has helped me find some interesting niche communities on Reddit and Lemmy who share and discuss things I'm interested in that I otherwise wouldn't have found.

It's very heartening to see all of the stories here.

I've put the last few years of my life into working on komorebi, a tiling window manager for Windows[1], https://notado.app, a content-first social bookmarking service, and https://kulli.sh, a "bring your own links" comment aggregator which shows you comments from hn, reddit, lobsters, lemmy etc. on an article all in one place.

Unfortunately I was laid off after 5 years with the same company last month, and nobody seems to care about any of these projects when it comes to recruiting. There are people who use them that have reached out to me very kindly offering to make referrals, but the job market values LeetCode more than shipping real code these days.

[1]: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi

In the spirit of full disclosure, I wanted to share that throughout the changeset of this refactor which included 11 files changed, 597 insertions, and 133 deletions (full diff here), a single regression was found due to a logic error I introduced.

The two biggest tiling window manager projects for Windows are komorebi and GlazeWM. Komorebi is probably faster and more resource efficient since it is written in Rust, but I stick with Glaze for now since it has a cool status bar built in I like.

Not too many options for Windows OS, but this one looks decent: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi.

It's been a while since I last posted here. Since my last post, komorebi passed 3k stars on GitHub, became the most starred Windows twm of all time (surpassing bug.n!) and crossed 20k downloads.