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AeroSpace Beta

AeroSpace is an i3-like tiling window manager for macOS

Videos:

• YouTube 91 sec Demo
• YouTube Guide by Josean Martinez

Docs:

• AeroSpace Guide
• AeroSpace Commands
• AeroSpace Goodness

Project status

Public Beta. AeroSpace can be used as a daily driver, but expect breaking changes until 1.0 is reached.

Key features

• Tiling window manager based on a tree paradigm
• i3 inspired
• Fast workspaces switching without animations and without the necessity to disable SIP
• AeroSpace employs its own emulation of virtual workspaces instead of relying on native macOS Spaces due to their considerable limitations
• Plain text configuration (dotfiles friendly). See: default-config.toml
• CLI first (manpages and shell completion included)
• Doesn't require disabling SIP (System Integrity Protection)
• Proper multi-monitor support (i3-like paradigm)

Installation

Install via Homebrew to get autoupdates (Preferred)

brew install --cask nikitabobko/tap/aerospace

(Optional) You might need to configure your shell to enable completion provided by homebrew packages: https://docs.brew.sh/Shell-Completion AeroSpace provides bash, fish and zsh completions.

In multi-monitor setup please make sure that monitors are properly arranged.

You can also install specific previous versions:

brew install --cask nikitabobko/tap/aerospace@0.12.0

For the list of all the versions available for installation via brew see: https://github.com/nikitabobko/homebrew-tap/tree/main/Casks

Manual installation

[!NOTE] By using AeroSpace, you acknowledge that it's not notarized.

Notarization is a "security" feature by Apple. You send binaries to Apple, and they either approve the binaries or not. In reality, notarization is about building binaries the way Apple likes it.

Let's be honest. Tiling window manager is not something Apple will be totally ok with. Even if they approve one version, it doesn't mean that they won't revoke it (yes, they can do it), or approve further versions.

I don't have anything against notarization as a concept. I specifically don't like the way Apple does notarization. I don't have time to fight Apple.

Homebrew installation script is configured to automatically delete com.apple.quarantine attribute, that's why the app should work out of the box, without any warnings that "Apple cannot check AeroSpace for malicious software"

Contributing, creating issues, submitting pull requests

See: CONTRIBUTING.md

Development

A notes on how to setup the project, build it, how to run the tests, etc. can be found here: dev-docs/development.md

Values of the project

Values

• AeroSpace is targeted at advanced users and developers
• Keyboard centric
• Breaking changes (configuration files, CLI, behavior) are avoided as much as possible, but it must not let the software stagnate. Thus breaking changes can happen, but with careful considerations and helpful message. Semver major version is bumped in case of a breaking change (It's all guaranteed once AeroSpace reaches 1.0 version, until then breaking changes just happen)
• AeroSpace doesn't use GUI, unless necessarily
  • AeroSpace will never provide a GUI for configuration. For advanced users, it's easier to edit a configuration file in text editor rather than navigating through checkboxes in GUI.
  • Status menu icon is ok, because visual feedback is needed
• Provide practical features. Fancy appearance features are not practical (e.g. window borders, transparency, etc)
• If "dark magic" (aka "private APIs", "code injections", etc) can be avoided, it must be avoided
  • Right now, AeroSpace uses only a single private API to get window ID of accessibility object _AXUIElementGetWindow. Everything else is macOS public accessibility API.
  • AeroSpace will never require you to disable SIP (System Integrity Protection). For example, yabai requires you to disable SIP to use some of its features. AeroSpace will either find another way (such as emulation of workspaces) or will not implement this feature at all (window transparency and window shadowing are not practical features)

Non Values

• Play nicely with existing macOS features. If limitations are imposed then AeroSpace won't play nicely with existing macOS features
  • E.g. AeroSpace doesn't acknowledge the existence of macOS Spaces, and it uses emulation of its own workspaces

Tip of the day

defaults write -g NSWindowShouldDragOnGesture -bool true

Now, you can move windows by holding ctrl+cmd and dragging any part of the window (not necessarily the window title)

Source: reddit

Related projects

• Amethyst
• yabai