Re:Way Cooler tiling window manager
by actsasbuffoon on Sunday July 02, 2017 @07:37AM
(#14682056)
i3 is my #1 reason for wanting to switch from MacOS to Linux. I love a good tiling window manager, and the workarounds to emulate a tiling WM in MacOS just aren’t close enough to the real thing.
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Did you try [chunkwm](https://github.com/koekeishiya/chunkwm) yet? It's the successor of kwm which I have tried on macOS.
Mainly I use i3 at Linux but for some work I have to use macOS as well.
The only native apps which feel Linux like are iTerm and Emacs (the mac port) because it's possible to suppress the window decorations. Every other native app takes for a real tiling wm too much space with its Titel bar and other frames.
I did this recently for the same reason.
Do not wait and get a Linux system with i3 tomorrow. You will be so much faster and more structured in your daily workflow than with Alt-Tab.
A nice side effect: Apps feel much faster than on OSX. I don't know why but everything is snappier and just more resonsive despite a much weaker CPU and same hires screen on the Linux system. Especially the terminal rendering and application switching which is instant.
It might have to do with the transition animations in OSX. I found a long time ago that turning off the animations in Windows makes a system feel a while lot more responsive.
I switched from OSX to Linux specifically for i3. Linux is still a pretty annoying OS with lots of little to even big problems like NetworkManager flaking out, suspend/resume being flaky, trackpad annoyances, etc. But despite all of that, I still use Linux because i3 is that damn good. i3 has fundamentally made computing more enjoyable, and enables me to stay "in the flow" much more.
Have you tried out openbsd?
Not trying to start a flame war but once I managed to install it how I liked the entire system felt so cohesive and well designed. (Ifconfig handling wpa for instance) and it turned out to be so much lighter that my laptops battery life went up 20%.
It was an older thinkpad though. So I guess YMMV.
I like the BSDs in general and have used them in the past. But for my work I can only use OSX or Linux, as some of the stuff I need is only supported on those OSes. I could probably make a BSD work if I really wanted to, but it's easier to just go with the flow on some things.
You can run another window manager (i3) under Xquartz.
This isn't really helpful because the vast majority of OSX apps do not use X11.
Maybe Amethyst is your jam: https://ianyh.com/amethyst/