Introducing Yashiki: A macOS window manager with the river/awesome philosophy

In my previous entry, I wrote about extending AeroSpace, but as development progressed, I quickly hit a wall. Specifically, I ran into the limitation that AeroSpace doesn't expose layout information. I reached the conclusion that no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't completely build what I wanted with that approach.

But I thought I had no other choice. Honestly, I figured writing a Window Manager from scratch was impossible for a weekend developer. However, my fate was sealed when I started coding with a coding agent just for a bit of fun while having a drink this weekend.

Surprisingly, 6 hours later, I had something reasonably working. That made it incredibly fun, so I continued developing through the weekend. It has now reached a level where it's not just "minimum viable," but a decently fully-featured window manager. Here it is:

typester/yashiki: macOS tiling window manager

A macOS Window Manager with the Awesome/River philosophy

Yashiki (that's the name of the WM I'm building) is, honestly, a hardcore WM. It has no mouse operations. It probably won't resonate with most people using macOS.

However, if you are a former Linux user familiar with WMs like awesome or river, this WM is for you. River users, in particular, will feel a kinship. The command system, configuration method, and the decision to keep the layout engine external via plugins are all influenced by river.

I am a long-time Awesome user and a die-hard Linux user who has loved River in recent years. For unavoidable reasons, I have to use macOS, so I am writing this software to make this environment as close as possible to the one I'm used to. There might not be many, but surely there are others like me. I hope this helps them.

Conversely, I also recommend this to people interested in Linux desktops.

If you can use Yashiki, you will definitely be able to use river without any awkwardness immediately. In other words, you can get a feel for the Linux desktop while using macOS.

Where to start

I worked reasonably hard on a Quick Start document, so please refer to that first.

For the concept of "Tags," the river documentation is also helpful, so take a look.

I want to collect Workarounds

Unfortunately, macOS WMs cannot avoid workarounds for apps that behave strangely.

For example, Firefox generates mysterious windows (popup menus or something), which causes terrible flickering if used normally. The current workaround for that is adding the following settings:

yashiki rule-add --app-id org.mozilla.firefox --subrole AXUnknown ignore
yashiki rule-add --app-id org.mozilla.firefox --title "" float

To allow creating many such workarounds, the rule settings are insanely robust.[1] If there are any adventurous souls using this WM, please teach me the workarounds you've configured via issues or pull requests. Based on that, I want to flesh out a workaround page.

Future Prospects

Actually, I use tiling window managers very simply, so it's no exaggeration to say that almost all the functions I need are already implemented. However, since I designed the layout to be freely extensible, I also want to try making various other layouts.

If you have any requests, please head to the issues.

Also, the layout engine is open for anyone to create, so if you are interested, check out the docs.

See ya.