Nehir: a tiling window manager for macOS
4 points by fanf
4 points by fanf
Will be giving this a try, as Aerospace is super buggy and frustrating for my very simple and limited feature set. I always get frustrated however when I see a very visually focused product with no screenshots/videos showing it in use! I may end up installing this and immediately end up uninstalling it due to some UI annoyance I could have immediately seen from a 5 second video clip. Alternatively, and much more likely, I would just end up never installing something initially if I didn't have a quick insight into how it would behave after I had it up and running!
Nehir is my current window manager. I started my journey in alternative WMs on AeroSpace for a year or more, and it's excellent, but the lure of having a Niri-like scrolling window manager became too strong. Once it added Sequoia support, I used OmniWM for a number of months, but the pace of the project (partially fueled by LLM and partially by never saying no) just became untenable. Finally, when it removed Sequoia support, I had to move on. I found Nehir, which is a sane and focused fork and I'm loving it so far a few weeks in.
I guess maybe it works for some people but saying that it's not going to work well with monitor arrangement set to reflect the reality of how 99% of people use multiple monitors sounds like a non starter to me.
It's not telling you to physically rearrange displays, only to do it virtually, assumption being that you won't be using your cursor to cross the border very often anyways, instead jumping between displays using WM shortcuts
I realise what it's saying, and I'm saying that asking the user to make mouse interaction between displays annoying ay best sounds like a non starter to me.
But also the aim of the whole thing is to relieve you from having to move your mouse outside of a single window, so it may be a sensible workaround for the target audience.
Though the fact that that's the state of window management on Mac, is the reason why I personally will never use one, even if an employer provided the machine.
Given that things like the Dock and Menu bar exist outside of any window, I'm not really sure how you're going to achieve that apparent goal.
My comment was merely to point out that this seems like it breaks a fairly basic assumption about how a multi-display desktop works.
I don't understand the appeal of tiling window managers. Overlapping windows make my desktop like a physical desk: I can have overlapping things piled on it, I can see them, and I can easily pull the ones I want to the front. I can use spatial memory (something humans are really good at!) to keep track of where things are and find them easily. I generally have more windows open at any give time than would usefully fit on the screen, and I want different combinations of them visible at different times.