yabai VS Windows Terminal

Compare yabai vs Windows Terminal and see what are their differences.

yabai

A tiling window manager for macOS based on binary space partitioning (by koekeishiya)
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yabai Windows Terminal
218 506
21,317 93,467
- 0.6%
9.1 9.7
20 days ago 2 days ago
C C++
MIT License MIT License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

yabai

Posts with mentions or reviews of yabai. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-02-17.
  • My MacBook setup (the 2024 version)
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Feb 2024
    It exists! Check out [yabai](https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai), which is nicely paired with [skhd](https://github.com/koekeishiya/skhd).
  • Ask HN: Best Hacks for a Ultrawide Monitor?
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Feb 2024
    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.

  • Is there an app that does this Windows feature?
    1 project | /r/MacOS | 5 Dec 2023
    Want something free that's better than tiling on Windows? Yabai.
  • Yabai – A tiling window manager for macOS
    1 project | /r/hackernews | 2 Dec 2023
    35 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Nov 2023
    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...

  • Asahi Linux folks are doing us a solid with WPA3 fixes
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 7 Nov 2023
    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.

  • macOS Containers v0.0.1
    24 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Sep 2023
    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.

  • Yabai: A binary space partitioning tiling window manager for macOS
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Aug 2023
  • Ask HN: Why does Apple refuse to add window snapping to macOS?
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Jun 2023
    This is disproven by the fact that Yabai [1] can instantly swap spaces with SIP disabled.

    [1] https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai

  • [Serious] I don't get why people like Mac and I feel like I'm missing out
    4 projects | /r/webdev | 11 Jun 2023
    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.

Windows Terminal

Posts with mentions or reviews of Windows Terminal. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-12.
  • Deleting Software I Wrote Upon Leaving Employment of a Company
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Mar 2024
    > convince management of the value

    This presupposes that such convincing is even possible. Many, many companies have leadership that are simply terrible at identifying value. If you've never been part of a majority of developers advocating for, if not outright begging for, some huge ROI initiative to get the green light, you are very fortunate.

    There are great counterexamples, like Valve, which is known for giving developers an extreme degree of autonomy, and they benefit greatly from that approach. For each Valve, though, there are dozens of companies that manage to succeed despite themselves.

    Take Microsoft, for example. One tiny, yet representative, example: the way the Windows Terminal team handled a suggestion from Casey Muratori to take their software from abysmally slow to lightning fast:

    https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362

    A quote from one of the Terminal developers, dismissing the suggestion:

    > I believe what you’re doing is describing something that might be considered an entire doctoral research project in performant terminal emulation as “extremely simple” somewhat combatively…

    Just how difficult was such an endeavor in actuality? Well, given that Casey implemented his own terminal emulator from scratch and incorporated the functionality he was proposing in a mere weekend... not a whole lot. Relatively minor effort for a huge return on investment. It took Casey explaining the concepts, then providing a working proof of concept, and finally a bunch of backlash online towards the Terminal team to get them to do the right thing for themselves and their users.

  • A glimpse into the universe where Windows died with the 1980s
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Mar 2024
    At this point ConHost.exe is open source [0] so it is maybe not a stretch to expect Microsoft to open source CMD.EXE at some point.

    Though with PowerShell being cross-platform and already open source, I personally don't think there's enough to gain in some sort of better open source CMD.EXE fork. I'd be interested in being proved wrong on that, but I'm also happy enough with PowerShell these days I'm not in a hurry to return to CMD.EXE.

    [0] https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/tree/main/src/host

  • Windows 11 looks to be getting a key Linux tool added in the future
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Feb 2024
    "Users of Linux and macOS may well be familiar with the sudo command, used regularly in the terminal, and it looks like Windows may finally be getting its own version."

    More Linux tools are coming to Windows, especially Windows Server because the tools are good and they make it easier to administer a Windows Server.

    They are looking at adding a default TUI text editor (https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/discussions/16440) and now they are adding sudo.

    I would not be surprised if systemd or something like it gets ported or reinvented for Windows simply because it makes managing services so nice.

  • Overview over Microsoft's developer tools for Windows
    4 projects | dev.to | 19 Jan 2024
    GitHub
  • On Being Listed as an Artist Whose Work Was Used to Train Midjourney
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Jan 2024
    >We are allowed to view and consume it, to be influenced by it, and under many circumstances even outright copy it.

    People keep saying this but it's actually much more complicated, and in many cases you can't view copyrighted content.

    An example, MicroSoft employees are not permitted to view or learn from an open source (GPL-2) terminal emulator:

    https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10462#issuecomm...

    Another example is proprietary software that may have it's source available, either intentionally or not. If you view this and then work on something related to it, like WINE for example, you are definitely at risk of being successfully sued.

    If you worked at MicroSoft and worked on Windows, you would not be able to participate in WINE development at all without violating copyright.

    If you viewed leaked Windows source code you also would not be able to participate in WINE development.

    An interesting question that I have, is whether training on proprietary, non-trade-secret sources would be allowed. Something like unreal engine, where you can view the source but it's still proprietary.

  • Terminal Smooth Scrolling
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Jan 2024
    Windows Terminal is pretty good and a new terminal emulator written in the last few years. No smooth scrolling, here's the GitHub issue requesting it: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/1400
  • Microsoft defends Edge's predatory practices with cringe reply on X
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Dec 2023
    Assume its related to this:

    https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362

    It's nothing serious just microsoft engineers writing slow as shit code and reacting poorly to someone trying to help.

  • Should Windows have a default CLI editor?
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Dec 2023
    "There are plenty of offline scenarios where this would be incredibly useful. For disconnected environments, etc. There are some environments that will never connect to winget."

    Source: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/discussions/16440#disc...

  • Windows Feature Exploration: Default CLI Text Editor
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 10 Dec 2023
  • Default Windows CLI Text Editor (Neovim/Emacs/edit/)
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Dec 2023

What are some alternatives?

When comparing yabai and Windows Terminal you can also consider the following projects:

Amethyst - Automatic tiling window manager for macOS à la xmonad.

Tabby - A terminal for a more modern age

Rectangle - Move and resize windows on macOS with keyboard shortcuts and snap areas

cmder - Lovely console emulator package for Windows

vscode-vibrancy - Enable Acrylic/Glass effect for your VS Code.

sixel-tmux - sixel-tmux is a fork of tmux, with just one goal: having the most reliable support of graphics

Karabiner-Elements - Karabiner-Elements is a powerful utility for keyboard customization on macOS Sierra (10.12) or later.

PowerShell - PowerShell for every system!

alt-tab-macos - Windows alt-tab on macOS

starship - ☄🌌️ The minimal, blazing-fast, and infinitely customizable prompt for any shell!

MonitorControl - 🖥 Control your display's brightness & volume on your Mac as if it was a native Apple Display. Use Apple Keyboard keys or custom shortcuts. Shows the native macOS OSDs.

refterm - Reference monospace terminal renderer