Kwm, tiling window manager for OS X

Re:Kwm, tiling window manager for OS X by abathologist on Tuesday December 22, 2015 @10:30AM (#10778254)

I'd be curious to know how this software compares with Amethyst. I've also been using Amethyst for some time with no problems, but it is sometimes a bit sluggish. I have so far assumed this has more to do with unavoidable limitations in the OS X gui ecosystem. It is written in Objective-C, is available on homebrewa and has a binary distribution available, provides a gui configuration manager, and seems to include all features claimed by kwm—including focus follows mouse. But if I knew how the two projects differ and, in particular, what kwm provides (or plans to provide) that Amethyst doesn't, I might consider giving it a shot.

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Re:Kwm, tiling window manager for OS X by ianyh on Tuesday December 22, 2015 @10:51AM (#10778369)

At a guess, I would expect kwm to be faster, but probably less far along than Amethyst in terms of features/stability.

It's been a long time since I've actually written any C++, but briefly looking through the code it looks like it's making some of the same assumptions I made that resulted in some strange problems like the dreaded fullscreen bug (https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst/issues/254). That said, some of those assumptions were made 3 OS X versions ago so things might have improved.

It does, however, look a lot lighter weight than Amethyst is, and it looks like it does a better job at aggressively caching. It also supports binary space partitioning, which Amethyst doesn't support yet (https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst/issues/255). If I'm reading it correctly, though, that's the only thing it supports.

All in all, it seems like a great project. We could probably learn some things from each other, and I expect both projects would be the better for it.

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