Holy smokes, watched this a week ago and had to come back to say THANK YOU for exposing me to SpaceLauncher! It's plugged almost all the holes in my 'keep your hands on the keyboard' setup! Very grateful! 🙏
I love this so much that I'm considering giving up all my defaults to follow your visionary efficiency. Thank you so much bro - I haven't looked through the comments or links yet for a repo, way too blown away by what I just saw. Will probably hit you up later - thanks again!
Thanks for the tutorial. You will like Karabiner. To create a hyperkey ( command+option+shift+control , for example ) using the capslock key. Or have your right command send a F16 on a single press/release. Or use left control to do a mouse click down/up. To give a few examples. My capslock opens Alfred on single press and sends control+option+shift when pressed down. I use these for all my window navigation. And because it’s hyper it will never conflict with other apps using modifiers for shortcuts.
I enjoyed the video a lot. I wonder why the RU-vid algorithm hasn't made me aware of your channel earlier. What you show mimics the workflow I presently use on Arch + DWM and since the new MacBooks have come out, I'm drawn to macOS (which I used extensively 15 years ago) again. I'm baffled that the out-of-the-box window management hasn't improved since, and I know for a fact that StageManager won't be something I'm looking forward to. I hope you can share more knowledge like this.
Linux? Are you from space huh? No one can match the efficiency and productivity of mac keep in mind….linux is way behind no chance…you are new to mac i guess that’s why you don’t know these things….
@@muhammadraza7231 so I've been working as a software engineer for the past 8years, being a mac user on personal side for the past 15y(coding, editing, music production)and half of my SE carrier on Linux. Terminal, native Linux support (and native docker support) and "space" have been available in Linux way before MacOS introduced them. So if you look at the history, mac is actually slowly catching up things for developer experience.
@@mehdio i am a full-stack web dev and ios app dev and a mac user for the past 15 years ...so you can install asana Text expandar Keyboard maestro Alfred and many more productivity tools on linux? Can you share your phones photos to your linux in 3 sec? Can your custom devices compete with apple ecosystem? Linux is way behind in overall efficiency and OVERALL productivity...even many software isn't available for linux...in short after using mac and apple ecosystem you can't go back!
Thanx for the video! I really like the setup with SpaceLauncher and Yabai/skhd. Next steps are for me to look a bit deeper into your neovim setup, I like that it is very clean and setup in separate files. Makes it easy to find things :)
Awesome video, super helpful! I really like the reduced motion. Been giving space launcher a try for about a day now, super cool app, but I am having trouble getting the timing down. It either takes too long to trigger space + key or there is too long of a delay before a space being entered as text. I will continue tweaking it and trying to get it to work more fluidly as you seem to have. Again great video, looking forward to the next!
I already used Amethyst and shortcuts for many things. But this is the next level. From the bottom of my heart, thank you! I love SpaceLauncher and mission control Desktop jumping. This is gold! But my leader in vim is space as well. I probably need to change that :)
Glad it helped! My leader key in vim is space as well. You just have to get used to how long to hold the space bar to get spacelauncher to do it’s thing.
I've been using Amethyst, but after this video I'm trying Yabai+skhd looks and feels pretty awesome, I think it has more value into the keyboard experience.
Thank you for all of your videos. I'm a mac user but I've always been very interested in linux-like workflows and I wasn't aware that it was possible on a mac as well. I'd love to see a video about how to manage dotfiles on macos and how to clean up the home directory. I'm considering wiping my mac and starting fresh so I can have a clean home directory cus I've built up so many dot files that I can't possibly clean it up, and a video on how to maintain a clean home directory would be great.
Thanks for the tips in this video, Josh! I incorporated most of your set-up. I found that the order of Mac OS desktops kept changing on me: apparently this is a setting in Mission Control you can disable: `Automatically rearrange Spaces based on recent use`. Keep it up :)
@@JoshMedeski I'm unfortunately stuck on installing yabai. I usually dont have issue with home-brew but I'm getting a weird error where it cannot find any formulas named yabai. Edit: I restarted the installation process using the guide from the wiki. It works now!
Awesome! Thank you! I'd love a video on all your keyboard shortcuts and snippets/aliases. I'd love to use your stack but I'm not sure how to properly intuitively organize keyboard shortcuts between yabai, tmux, vim splits etc... it almost seems like theres too many different splitting/focus shifting shortcuts I'd have to account for for all 3 of those.
I try to keep everything consistent. But the main key is to learn one at a time. After a few years it will all become muscle memory. But it takes time.
@@JoshMedeski Yeah for sure, it's more that I'm wondering how you avoid conflicts between yabai shortcuts, tmux shortcuts, vim shortcuts, and your various snippets and command expansions if you get what I mean. Like, do they not overlap by default? If so that's fine and I can just focus on adding things 1 by 1 and keeping things intuitive for myself, I'm just worried that the essential/default shortcuts on yabai, tmux, vim, and some essential vim plugins will conflict with each other if I install them together.
@@SkullTraill I see. Tmux is driven by a prefix, which doesn't conflict with vim. However, there are some clever tmux/vim plugins that do a good job at dealing with conflicts. Hope that helps, maybe in a future video or tweet I can share more of my insights.
@@JoshMedeski ahhh, I see. Ok cool I’ll hopefully make the jump soon. Thanks for the explanation and thanks for the awesome videos, looking forward to more content! 😍
Really cool setup, I'm not even on a mac (don't ask me why I watched this, I just like to watch random things lol), but I do use a tiling window manager on my linux setup (hyprland, in case anyone wonders). There's some nice bits of workflow in here that I'm definitely gonna be looking into to speed up my own workflow, most notably the space launcher thing you have sounds incredibly useful. Guess I go find me a linux alternative for that now :)
Thanks for an amazing video! Can you make two windows float and use the --swap west/south/north/east shortcuts shown at 4:43 to switch between them? Also, if two floating windows overlap, does switching between them brings the focused windows to front (i3 behavior) or not (dwm behavior)?
When i eventually get m1, i'll be using the tips covered... i managed to get similar results on Windows 11 with DWM-win-32, and now, knowing it's possible to do the same on mac, i feel like nothing will be slower with the transition... anyway, M1 chips have problems with Yabai?
Josh, you're pure evil! You wasted sooo much of my priceless time (almost 1 hour :O). Instead of working, I was implementing your Yabai approach, great job, love it, we want more! ❤😃 Increases productivity drastically indeed.
Thanks for the video! Couple of questions: - You're using Yabai with System Integrity Protection disabled, aren't you? - Does SpaceLauncher Support opening Chrome with specific profile?
I do disable SIP to get a couple of the features mentioned in the video. And I haven’t figured out how to open chrome by profile, let me know if you figure it out!
Wow.. as I wait for my mac studio I've been researching for macOS apps since I have not used it in a bit. I was running i3wm gaps as a tiling window manager on Arch Linux. This video made my day as that was something I was going to miss.. the config files look pretty similar too. Alacritty and Yabai on macOS, looks promising.. Thanks!! Do you have any .dotfiles videos? I would love to see how you manage them!
Thanks for the video! Is there any reason you don't choose to use skhd to launch applications with a shortcut vs using SpaceLauncher? At first I thought SpaceLauncher was the ticket to my app launching speed, but I ran into issues with it messing with my use of as leader key in (n)vim. And then there are a few other scenarios where holding spacebar is the way to drag things around (for example if you take a screenshot with command + alt + 4 and want to move the entire selection, you have to hold space).
Maybe I’ll experiment with skhd more but I’ve been using spacelauncher for years and it’s worked well. I also have space as the leader key in vim but I’ve never run into any conflicts.
I really enjoy your niche channel. I wish yabai on m1 didn't break on every system update. I always get fed up by the limitations and go back to my linux box.
Greetings, I'm not so comfortable with these things. Question 1: Do you need to manually create your .yabairc, and .skhdrc files? Question 2: Where do you place these? Cheers in advance :)
Great video. Love the setup and I am using alot of it since starting out with macOS. :) Quick question. Whats behind the "command + N" at 5:00 to open a new terminal window? I am lacking a keyboard shortcut to open another instance of a program at the moment. Do you usually never have multiple instances of the same program open to not confuse spacelauncher as it doesn't really handle that?
Nice walkthrough! Does spacelauncher start the app in the correct desktop? And if so, does it create the desktop if it doesn’t exist? Also, you installed yabai with SIP turned off, right? Is it worth doing? Thanks!
Spacelauncher will open focus the existing app and switch to the appropriate desktop. But, if the app isn’t open, it will open a new window for the application on the current window. Hope that makes sense.
Thank! So desktops continue counting up when more screens are added. So if you have 5 desktops on the first screen and add a second screen desktops on the second screen are numbered 6, 7, 8, etc… hope that makes sense.
Great video! Yabai and skhd are amazing. You could use Yabai and skhd for space switching... much faster than the macOS way (even faster than your fix). Just disable the space switching keypress shortcuts from macOS and add something like this to your skhd config: alt - 1 : yabai -m space --focus 1 alt - 2 : yabai -m space --focus 2 alt - 3 : yabai -m space --focus 3 alt - 4 : yabai -m space --focus 4 alt - 5 : yabai -m space --focus 5 alt - 6 : yabai -m space --focus 6 alt - 7 : yabai -m space --focus 7 alt - 8 : yabai -m space --focus 8 alt - 9 : yabai -m space --focus 9 alt - 0 : yabai -m space --focus 10 Maybe even (of course adjust the shortcuts to your liking): cmd + alt - x : yabai -m space --focus recent cmd + alt - z : yabai -m space --focus prev cmd + alt - c : yabai -m space --focus next
@Tim Hansinger tried these commands in my sxkd but they dont work (disabled the mission control keybindings in the macos preferences) do I need to add anything to the yabairc (like naming the spaces or sth.) for this to work?
I wish I'd see someone with this type of set up whenever I look at an web dev tutorial. I swear they always seem to use macos and at the same time have it be the default experience.
Create as many desktops as you think you'll need before going to the keyboard settings in macOS. For some reason the ability to bind shortcuts doesn't work if you only have one desktop open.
Hi, I'm working in multitasking mode, I have a lot of windows open in close to each other and shadows are cast on other windows and this is very annoying, can it be turned on or off using the utility?
I realized after watching this video that Yabai isn't for me. This wasn't anything against your video of course. I just realized I already had most of this stuff taken care of with BetterTouchTool. The only thing I wish I had from Yabai is the custom border highlight + auto-space filling algorithm. Nice spacebar app too. I like the idea, but I would be worried that instead of switching to my main working browser that I switched to my browser for RU-vid videos on a screen-share, haha. + 1 for Reduced Motion. I wish I knew about this earlier.
On my macbook pro (Ventura 13.2.1), there are only swtich to desktop 1-3 to set shortcut, unlike yours, there are swtich desktop 1-11. How do I get that ? Trying to resovling it.
I found some response from stackflow. I need to add desktops, and put some app to those desktops from 1 to 10, and then back to mission control shortcut setting. It'll show switch to desktop 1-10 shortcut settings.
I love the video! Many thanks for sharing. But is very funny that you remember a pile of hotkeys/combinations, and to close a terminal you write “exit” instead of CTRL+D 😂
This looks very good. I just came from i3 which I got really really confident with, to a new macbook now. Even after a couple weeks with it, I still think floating window management (windows, mac os) is so freaking clunky. I guess this could get similar to i3-gaps, which is hot! Just have to get used to new key bindings i guess
@@JoshMedeski Thanks for the reply! I just wonder, did you ever work in Linux? Since you mention Macos is where you feel most productive etc, but this is 100% obviously inspired by the tiling wms on linux :) How does this compare to amethyst and chunkwm? idk if the last one still around..
@@kbaeve I have used Linux some over the years but I prefer macOS’s keybinding and software options and have other apple products so everything works well together. So chunkwm is not longer in development and recommends yabai and I tried Amethyst wasn’t as feature filled at the time I was looking for a good window manager (5-6 years ago) so I’ve stuck with yabai as it was the best choice for me back then.
When using SpaceLauncher for a program that's on another desktop, it'll run the program but it won't switch to the desktop. Any ideas how I could get this to work? Anyways, thanks for the helpful video! :)
I was listening this in two different setups 1: macbook pro M1 pro, macos monterrey, chrome 2: pc windows 10 firefox volume is up to 100% in both setups in both youtube and the system and in the mac sounds a lot lower, with your video, not other videos, just a suggestion to encode the audio in the video with higher volume. It can be fixed easily by a sound booster or a headphone amp, but I think is better if it is straight from the source.
Hi, I finally decided to make the switch to yabai and love it. However, none of the keyboard shortcuts with skhd work. I know there is a tmux problem with the alt key, but I cannot use the alt key either with yabai.
actually no - which makes it super weird! I tried replacing alt with ctrl and they don't work... so I tried different keyboard layouts (I am using US - International, tried with US and Unicode Hex Input) and none seem to work. Only those with cmd.
that bind to "go to workspace 1-9" is missing on my keyboard shortcuts setting ....it has just workspace 1 and 2. Did they deprecate this or am i missing something?
It's hidden away under a dropdown in the Mission Control section. I've added a screenshot to the bottom of the article, hope it helps! www.joshmedeski.com/posts/blazing-fast-window-management-on-macos/
@@JoshMedeski no thats not it ...mine only has 1 and 2, there is option to set keybind for desktop 3. i have new mac so maybe there is UPDATE waiting for ya
@@11WicToR11 thanks for the heads up hopefully it’s a bug that can be fixed. You can also use skhd to do something similar by adding the script addition (which requires some extra work)
@@JoshMedeski np, ye ...i come from 10yrs of linux and mac was forced by my employee ...so far i m not very happy and i will definitely go for yabai and sxhd but will give it few days at least. I come from bspwm, awesomewm and dwm ...hopefully yabai is at least close :(
@@JoshMedeski i figured it out, the issue is that those options are only visible if you open settings with workspaces already existing .....dont ask me why would that be the case, makes no sense to me, but i guess its a feature :) hopefully this helps someone
I have been using tilling window managers on Linux for quite some time now, and on my new job they're gonna give me a Mac. On Linux I have always mapped the window managing shortcuts to the super key (windows key). Is it a problem to map things to the command button in mac, instead of alt?
@@JoshMedeski well, I'll just have to get used to it and find short cuts that work for me, I suppose. Thank you so much for such quick replies to a somewhat old video. I was not expecting it and I really appreciate it!
It’s over half the keystrokes: “space+a” vs “Cmd+space+a+l+enter”. I do use Alfred sometimes to open apps but my most used apps are all tied to spacelauncher.
@@JoshMedeski I was also wondering if you know if yabai has a shortcut to stack and unstack all applications on a specific desktop each with a single command (as opposed to separately stacking west/east/north/south etc).
I have discover yabai thanks to your last video. It is working so much better than Amethyst. Almost as good as Linux. But wait a minute, that was not so easy for me to install. I needed to go in recovery, disable some security and an other command then 2 others commands. Did I miss something ?
I know this will never be answered because this video is over 2 years old. How do you deal with window placement layouts when apps are starting? Is there a way to automate window management?
Thanks for this. I didn't know something like this exists. It'll improve my productivity a lot with these apps (I don't know how I survived without yabai)
Great video, if you want to see the BEST ever window/tiling manager, check out the Linux distro POP OS, by a company called System 76 ,and their window tiling manager. It makes Mac OS and Windows 11 look like their Window management systems were created by a 5 year old, they are 100 % inferior to the way POP OS does it It has a simple slider button in the top bar to turn on and off, once turned on, all you do is open any app and it will automatically tile after the first one. The first app opens full screen, the next app opens with both in split view, the next app with 1 app half screen and 2 in split screen, the next opens with 4 even tiles and so on, it has a simple keyboard shortcut to switch between each window by using the Windows key on the keyboard and the arrow key to change to the tiled window you are switching which is highlighted with a large orange border each time you switch. You can easily modify the spaces between the tiled windows in the settings GUI, as well as well as modify the split view left to right or top to bottom . So simple and easy compared to anything else.And it works with ALL apps not just some !!
thanks for the great content! @Josh medeski Can you help me? how do you open up the new window at ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-fYsCAOfGjxE.html ? what is the configuration? thanks
Looks awesome! But I personally like Rectangle Pro. Its not open source but is comparable to yabai. I believe it was $4.99. Good alternative if you want to skip all the text editing. 🤣 This looks like it would take a whole day to set up.
Well, it's a tiling _window_ manager, not a tab manager. It is supposed to work with windows. That doesn't make it pointless, it makes it very good at its job. Just don't use tabs if you _only_ want to use yabai.
@@wohfab what the hell are you talking about? tabs are windows nested inside other windows, genius. yabai even thinks that they are windows which is why it's trying to tile a window with 2 tabs like it was 2 windows, which does actually make it pointless and not very good at it's job at all. just don't use tabs? maybe you should just not post dumb comments on youtube videos.
Looks pretty nice. As a Linux power user coming to Mac, I was immediately frustrated by the absolutely horrible out of the box window management and the lacklustre support for setting up keyboard shortcuts. I can deal with pretty much any major desktop environment and adapt to its work flow philosophy, but MacOS feels light years behind. I'm also incredibly surprised that configuring the touch pad is pay-locked behind 3rd party apps, considering how big a deal people make about the supposedly incredible track pad. All I want is to get some kind of middle click working, as I've come to heavily incorporate a third mouse button, even on a touch pad, into my work flow. Tried setting it up Yabai, but initially, it seems like half the settings don't work, though that might be down to Ventura. Which, to be fair, Yabai doesn't claim support for. I'll give it a proper go this weekend, but if I can't get this set up, I'm sending the device back. I've already wasted enough time with this user-hostile excuse for an operating system. Don't think I've been as frustrated with a piece of tech since Vista.
As a fellow Linux user i was frustrated as well, after coming from Linux, POP OS, and their brilliant window tiling system, Mac OS window management looks like a 5 year old created it, absolutely pathetic !!! I personally use all 3 OS, Linux for privacy and security, Windows for gaming ( still better than Linux unfortunately, which is coming ahead in leaps and bounds ) and unfortunately Mac OS because it is the best for photo and video editing with real time scrubbing on videos.
