Show HN: Sunlight – the camera-based infinite canvas window manager for Mac | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Sunlight – the camera-based infinite canvas window manager for Mac

sunlight.software

8 pointsdarindd2 comments

Hey HN, I'm Darin. You might know me from my work at Webflow (YC S13) and currently Ploy (YC P26).

Sunlight is the way I imagined the Mac working before I got my 1st-gen MacBook Air in high school (2008). I had looked at a bunch of Apple videos of Mission Control (Exposé back then) and somehow decided it worked like an infinite canvas. I even told my mom about it! I guess it stuck with me.

Windowing on the Mac is so good it's one of those "if it ain't broke don't fix it" things. And yet, it always felt lacking. So Sunlight reimagines it from first principles:

- 355"+ virtual desktop

- 120fps, fully native

- Multi-touch interactions

- Guides, grids and haptics

- Minimap

- ⌘Tab and Mission Control work as usual

- Works with your Dock, widgets and desktop

- Collision detection and magnetic windows

- Tiling and saved layouts

- Deeply customizable

- ...and much more (including agent support) coming soon

Free and open source, forever.

Launch demo (2:34): https://youtu.be/NSerIT8zRpw

Repo: https://github.com/spacefarm-digital/sunlight

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Amazing! I've dreamed of something like this for so long. I've tried to get into tiling window managers but they just feel claustrophobic to me. Being able to zoom out a bit and get some space like this with the window still in view is very relaxing. I can "take a step back" from what I'm working on and feel the system 2 start to kick in. Human memory is very spatial (memory palaces, method of loci, etc) so I always imagined optimal screen-based HCI would eventually land on an interface like this. The panning/zooming interface is so natural, even babies understand it.

Truth be told, though, I mostly alt+tab, autocomplete, or search my way through digital systems. It's like fast travel in a video game vs running from town to town yourself. If you know what you need to do and you're trying to get things done quickly, you fast travel. But there's some intangible value to manual travel. It helps you get your bearings and gives you time and space to process. So maybe this isn't a "hyper-efficient" window management paradigm, but it does give you mental space to breathe and reflect.

Technical Thoughts: - It's too bad Apple's APIs require disabling SIP for this to work as well as the author intends. I haven't tried it yet with SIP disabled - Even though this is technically impressive, the AI-generated copy is off-putting and sends a signal that the project and code are low quality. I know that's a debatable indicator of quality, but in a sea of vibe-coded AI slop projects, human-written prose really does stand out. Especially important if you hope to convince users to turn off SIP

Thanks for trying it! In all honesty I decided to launch a few weeks early for one main reason: after the first teaser the project started getting copied quite quickly, so I decided to put it out and encourage open source collaboration instead.

Will update the copy to something human-written for sure! Hope you like the product, I put a lot of love into it.

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