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Comment by throwaway6734 | Hacker News Reader

Mac's Window manager. I love how each separate screen had its own "space" that can be cycled through with control and arrow

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Interesting, can you expand on your workflow a bit more? I'm of the exact opposite opinion - I think Mac's window management is the absolute worst thing about using a Mac - so I'd love to know what I'm doing wrong.

I use one external monitor and MacBook screen. I full screen all applications and switch between them using control and the arrow key.

So my external monitor has email, IDE, and misc stuff.

Screen has browser, terminal, chat application.

Pressing control + up allows you to easily reorder and move elements. It's helpful to turn off the default option of automatically sorting your screens

Ah, interesting. I think we've arrived at a very similar setup, albeit implemented in different ways. I too use a MacBook and external monitor, and fullscreen my apps, but I just let them take up the whole screen minus the bar at the top, rather than explicitly use the fullscreen new workspace feature. I then swap between apps by binding all my most common apps to F1-F6 using Thor, which I find is easier to navigate than remembering workspace positions.

How do you handle split screen? Do you never have two programs side-by-side on the same screen? I've tried doing that in the official fullscreen mode but found the whole experience a pain, so I use rectangle to shift windows left and right.

Whenever I want to look at two things at once I display each item on a different screen.

If I really want to do split screen (very rarely), I press control + up and then drag one screen over.

I use full screen apps on my Mac and switch between them using ALT-Tab. But there is a bug whereby you don’t always get the window of the app showing if you ALT-Tab too quickly, even though it is selected. I might try something like your setup, or the one above instead.

I'd definitely recommend giving dedicated hotkeys (one per app) a try - it's very hard to go back to alt-tabbing after being able to switch so effortlessly. As I say, I use Thor, but I'm sure there's a bunch of alternatives out there.

I'm using it with https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst . It's ok and I couldn't manage without.

Thanks!

I run Ubuntu on my personal machine and haven't found a suitable alternative yet. The more time I spend on my Mac work machine the more I'm thinking about switching my personal one due to this

I went from using i3 on my personal Linux machine, to my macOS machine for work. I've had the same thoughts about switching back, but it wasn't an option. Amethyst pulled me through the worst. It can't compare to i3.

There's also this: https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai, but I haven't tried it out because of the disclaimer: "You acknowledge that you understand the potential risk that may come from disabling arrow_upper_right System Integrity Protection on your system"

The caveats section notes that

> If you are running on macOS High Sierra 10.13.6, you can reenable SIP after the scripting addition has been installed.

I'm not sure if that applies to only that version and no later versions.

Amethyst is a poor man's reimplementation of xmonad. Just use it on your Ubuntu machine.

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