The future (generally)

[asmvik]

So just wondering how many people use this software and how, and how to approach the future. Please answer the below poll if you care.

[ldelossa]

I personally use Yabai over Aerospace because it still allows you to work with spaces. It feels like a good compromise between having a managed tiling solution but not going too far away from the native macOS feel and usage.

[peppy]

Aerospace is not even a consideration for me because of how it "hides" windows (nikitabobko/AeroSpace#1008, nikitabobko/AeroSpace#790), making it unfeasible to use on a portable where the user cares about battery life. Every window is still "on screen" and rendering, bypassing power nap etc.

[gloceansh]

You can also see a tiny bit of the pixels of the windows on the corner of your monitors(s) which drives me nuts. And because of the way aerospace handles spaces you cannot use 2 monitors vertically OR horizontally that have the same aspect ratio... it's just a mess compared to yabai.

[ldelossa]

@peppy huh, I didn't consider this. I actually just did a quick test: nikitabobko/AeroSpace#128 (comment)

[Bellavene]

Yabai is not ideal, but still the best, and that says something. Without it, I can't use the system without frustrations.

[gloceansh]

As someone who has tried both aerospace and amethyst, neither come close to yabai. It is by far the best tiling WM out there for macOS, even if you use it with SIP enabled. It has become a crucial part of my workflow, I don't see myself using macOS without it. I understand that burnout is real, but many of us need yabai to stay around, even if no new features get implemented.

[rootix]

I really can't think of a future on MacOS without a tiling window manager. Yabai is the best of the bunch at the moment and i'm really missing it on Tahoe at the moment. On Windows i use GlazeWM which just announced, that there will be a MacOS version in some Weeks (no idea about the feature set and sip requirements). If Yabai would already be ready, i would not think a second about switching. But if the timeline will match, i will try out this alternative

[mhuber-avst]

I came from Linux with dwm (and sometimes one of it's forks) and when work issued me a Mac I spent three months playing with various window managers to figure out how to recreate my workflow. Yabai was superior by far, it works mostly how I want it to and the places it doesn't I don't mind switching my processes for. I'm not sure how I would function without it.

[mickaelperrin]

I loved Yabai (and chunkwm). It helps me a lot when moving from Linux (awesomewm) to MacOS. Sadly, I moved to Aerospace this year because using Yabai became more and more cumbersome to use with each new MacOS releases. The following issues were the reasons of my move:

• 1password biometric authentication randomly unresponsive #2456 1Password biometric authentification works randomly, this broke most of my shell scripts
• Scripting additions make macos 15.3.2 crash when connected to a sidecar display #2573 I changed my coworking space and I don't have enough desk space to use a full size secondary display. So I use my iPad Pro as second display, but scripting additions doesn't work properly with sidecar
• Some spaces names are lost after sleep #2229 sleep management (and plug / unplug computer from displays) broke the yabai config and a full deletion / creation of spaces is required

I switched to Aerospace. I had to forget some advanced features and a proper tiling system, but after some time I finally found a different and simpler workflow.

I am still convinced that Yabai is the most powerful solution but with the latest MacOS releases it looses some stability and I can't even imagine how time consuming it should be to develop and maintain a software like that without some proper and documented libraries.

So whatever you decide, thanks a lot for your incredible work, and I really hope that Yabai will find a second breath in a form or another. There is definitely a need for a proper tiling manager on MacOS (free/open source or not).

[FelixKratz]

For me personally, back when I discovered yabai, I was stunned by the creativity, code clarity and ease of use. So much so that I started tinkering with it myself. Digging into the code I was even more impressed by the mechanisms that had to be put in place to make „simple looking“ things work (window focus, sa, sl events) and I think yabai is reference material for many developers trying to achieve similar things.
But this cuts two ways I guess, it is impressive that it is at all possible but also makes it unstable by default.

I am open for further discussion should you wish for that Åsmund.

[acsandmann]

echoing this, i have never actually used yabai, but i would like to express my appreciation for the wonderful resource that it is. building a window manager that actually works would be truly impossible if not for all of the reverse engineering done for yabai.

[megum1n]

I can't use macos without yabai. Yeah, there are laggy animations and weird behavior sometimes, but it is still much better than native macos window manager.

[stephen-zeng]

Yabai is a wonderful tool for me to get rid of those annoying animations when in full-loaded workflow, especially the animation of switching desktop. Apart from that, I do use skhdrc more often since it is a shortcut for literally anything. But all in all, yabai is surely a must-have tool for me to use my Mac as the main working machine.

[adammfurman]

Yabai is one of my favorite software utilities. It is critical in my workflow. I do not find the alternatives to provide the usability and feature set that I like. I personally do not disable SIP, because security is of importance to me. I typically work with multiple monitors so space switching is not an issue for me. Otherwise, I just move windows manually with macOS default methods. I really do not like the Aerospace implementation with its own spaces. I used amethyst previously, but yabai has a preferred implementation. I would be very sad to see this project die, though I am not a programmer.

[ognistik]

Nothing out there can replace Yabai for me, and I've tried pretty much everything.

[itschip]

yup, tried aerospace for fun yesterday....so bad compared to yabai

[SamilKaraduman]

macOS feels really sluggish to use without yabai. Yabai is literally a work of art. Wouldn't use anything else. The fast workspace switching with SIP disabled is honestly the biggest game-changer by far, and really sped up my workflow ever since I started using it.

[CodeLyoko2610]

I depend on yabai and skhd.

Being on a company laptop means I cannot disable SIP, and have to update to new OS versions due to company policy, but I enjoy all of yabai's features I can get, even with fewer features and my quirky workarounds for every new OS release.

They are definitely central and personal parts of my workflow.

---

I tried aerospace, but not being able to utilize built-in spaces is a deal breaker for me. Yabai, on the other hand, feels natural.

[mikalcallahan]

First ChunkWM and then Yabai are essential parts of my workflow.

I don't disable SIP but having a proper tiling window manager on macOS has been essential after switching from Linux to macOS full-time.

[itschip]

If it so happens that this will not be updated to MacOS 26, or no more updates in general...maybe it could be an idea to add some contributer docs? How to set it up for development and some form of instructions? C is not my field, so I'm not really sure how it works, but it would cool to get an understanding and perhaps there could be some other people contributing to support 26?

[ldelossa]

@koekeishiya thank you!

If you have the time, would you mind giving a quick overview of yabai architecture? Just high level. I don't mind digging at the code to see if I can help fix up some things for tahoe since I'm running that version of macOS

Btw, issue is rather odd...

I log out the event handler:

- (void)activeSpaceDidChange:(NSNotification *)notification
{
    fprintf(stdout, "workspace change event\n");
    event_loop_post(&g_event_loop, SPACE_CHANGED, NULL, 0);
}

And despite correctly initializing the Workspace context, we never get events.
Not just for this, but ANY event handler method in workspace.m

[ldelossa]

Funny enough, If I don't use the CFRunLoop and start dequeuing off the NSApp one, everything begins to work. Events start flowing into event handlers, the focused workspace is now being updated, and events for changed workspace is working:

    for (;;) {
            NSAutoreleasePool *pool = [[NSAutoreleasePool alloc] init];
            NSEvent _ = [NSApp nextEventMatchingMask:NSEventMaskAny
                                                 untilDate:[NSDate distantFuture]
                                                 inMode:NSDefaultRunLoopMode
                                                 dequeue:YES];
            [pool drain];
    }

I'm not sure this is okay tho, if there are event sources which only fire on CFRunLoop, or if the NSApp event queue is the same as CFRunLoop. There's a lot of loops in macOS development 🤯

[asmvik]

From my understanding both of those statements should be equivalent, but maybe I misunderstood some detail when doing that part. Anyway it is not really needed; what we want to do is have the application mainloop run, which can be done by just calling [NSApp run];. I've added a commit to head that does this instead of the for (;;) ... Thanks.

[peppy]

Things are working again, thank you both ❤️

[ldelossa]

Thank you @koekeishiya !! This fixes literally all my issues right now :)

[anafvana]

Yabai is essential for my workflow. I would sooner switch back to Linux than use macOS without it

For my work computer, I need to have SIP enabled, but for my personal one... goodbye, SIP; Yabai is my best friend now

[asmvik]

Released v7.1.16 with preliminary macOS Tahoe support. Unsure if everything is working as expected, but should be an improvement at the very least.

[jokoso]

I'm late to the party, but just wanted to praise the work @koekeishiya and you guys are doing. Coming from i3 and later Sway on Linux this project (along with skhd and JankyBorders) has finally enabled me to feel "at home" on Silicon macs, leading to an overall better dev experience every day. I was running Arch on my old Intel mac, but had to sacrifice the excellent hardware support macOS provides.

Thank you for your hard work, and please do consider a future where this project continues to be actively maintained. 😉🙏

[gshpychka]

I'm late to the party, but just wanted to praise the work @koekeishiya and you guys are doing.

FYI it's just @koekeishiya for both yabai and skhd

[gshpychka]

Reminder that you can sponsor @koekeishiya's work over at https://www.patreon.com/c/aasvi

[dragobath2]

Yabai is essential. Yabai feels like it should be something macOS integrates. It's essential, highly flexible and fixes the complete absence of any window management in macOS.

[phantomwhale]

Had to remove SIP recently (work computer + increased "monitoring" of security threats on the system) and we pleasantly surprised that most things kept working almost as well as they had been; but I do miss that smooth extra power it gave me.

But didn't take long to adapt, and for the few days I tried to go cold turkey, back to default MacOS handling, it was... horrible.

[afragar]

Yabai is essential for me. It's the only macOS tiling manager which works with native spaces and fullscreen, and allows jumping to native spaces. Aerospace doesn't fit my workflow and is flaky, the entire approach feels wrong. There are two new tiling managers (https://github.com/acsandmann/rift, https://github.com/glide-wm/glide) which are going in a better direction but don't yet support the functionality I need.

Not immediately supporting the latest macOS version is no problem but I wouldn't want to fall more than a year or so behind. If Yabai becomes discontinued and none of the new tiling managers fill the gaps I'll move to Linux.

[danrocha]

I hope everyone who is saying Yabai is essential for their workflow can spare a few bucks and support @koekeishiya 's work on this. It is essential for me too (and I'm also a Patreon supporter, ofc).

[zanieb]

I just want to share that without this tool I wouldn't be able to work on macOS full-time at all — I'd switch to Linux if it didn't exist or wasn't compatible with a recent (though not necessarily the latest) macOS version. A tiling window manager is a core part of my workflow.

[zanieb]

I'd happily pay for the software or give money via GitHub Sponsors.

[gshpychka]

I'd happily pay for the software or give money via GitHub Sponsors.

https://patreon.com/aasvi

[KingSupernova31]

I don't disable SIP because I don't need any of the features it allows. I just use Yabai for basic window tiling, I don't use spaces or any of the fancy stuff.

[emptyflask]

I haven't used MacOS as my primary OS for years now. On Linux, I have muscle memory for my Xmonad config, and I use Yabai to mirror that experience as closely as possible whenever I have to pick up my Macbook. The only drawback is having to mess with it any time there's an OS update, and that seems to happen too often.