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by blakesmith 5098 days ago
If you're using OS X, you don't really have a choice of what window manager to use; you're at the mercy of Apple. If you're looking for ways to wrangle all your windows in OS X, I'd recommend something like SizeUp or Divvy. These aren't window managers in the classic linux sense, but they do provide convenient keyboard shortcuts for keeping your windows organized in OS X. I use SizeUp at work and home and it gives me all I need in Mac land.

If you're looking to up your terminal skills, I'd recommend looking at something like tmux.

3 comments

It's a shame xorg doesn't support IOKit any more. If it did, you'd be able to run an X server (not rootless) on OS X without having to boot a different kernel.

XQuartz is nice, but you're still subject to the OS X mouse acceleration etc.

That certainly helps, but it's not quite enough: http://d43.me/blog/1205/the-cause-for-all-your-mac-os-x-mous...

I suppose when I said "mouse acceleration" I really meant "mouse lag".

I also found that sizeup mostly fills my WM needs on mac

In some ways I prefer it to strict tiling window management like awesome or xmonad.

You lose the "windows automatically tile" functionality, but the other side of that is that it's easier to break the paradigm for when you don't want to tile.

free unlimited trial: http://www.irradiatedsoftware.com/sizeup/

or $14 for a license

Spectacle is a free open source application with the same feature set as SizeUp.

http://spectacleapp.com/

there's also tylerwm (google it). I'm currently writing my own with a totally different approach.
Have you tried tylerwm? It looks like what I desperately want on OS X, but every review I've read suggests it's too unstable to use. I'm nervous about paying $10 for something I'm not sure will work.
I tried tylerwm about three months ago and it was quite flaky. Sometimes it would re-arrange windows while I'm typing. Turned it off an hour later.
Save your money, it's unusable (windows jump around randomly).