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Comment by anonzzzies | Hacker News Reader

I have been trying this for a few months now. I3 is quite perfect and Aerospace is a nice try, but it’s very far from i3; it’s quite flaky. I guess this is because Mac OS X doesn’t actually allow full control like Unix WMs do?

I have not found anything better though, but I will install Linux when it’s working well on Apple Silicon. Only i3 is at least for me enough reason to use Linux as Mac OS X, again imho, is terrible window manager wise.

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Having dabbled in some of this for a hobby project (not a window manager, but adjacent), it’s because the official APIs to do these things with are limited. You end up relying a lot on undocumented private APIs and hacks, which are flaky both due to their undocumented internal-use nature and because the OS isn’t designed to play nice with significant meddling with window/process management, which results in the OS and third party app frequently stepping on each others’ toes.

Apple being Apple... gosh they just know how to build hardware but for software they just flop.

In fairness, I’ve encountered similar flakiness when using third party window/desktop manager utilities on Windows. Commercial OSes in general just aren’t designed with that kind of flexibility in mind.

Got the same issue. I am still to find a WM that can deal with native OSX fullscreen mode.

Aerospace goes bongers when i have native full screen. It will get confused on what to focus. My case:

Workspace 1: terminal Workspace 2: slack app Open chrome in native full screen

Now try to switch to workspace 1.

Will give it more time without native fullscreen apps for a while. Hopefully it works better.

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