If you are on a Mac, check out OmniWM, which has a Niri layout, in addition to one that's more like Hyprland. It has made my work on MacOS much more pleasant.
I'm sorry, but they have the worst demo video I have seen in my life. Nobody will want to try their software after watching that video. If you watch it, you will probably want to uninstall it, even if you're already a user.
This is 100% visual software used for one of the most important functions of a computer: window management. I can't think of any software where it is more important that the demonstration video is good.
What else than a video would be suitable for demonstrating this software?
It is very good even though it's in early development. Issues are getting fixed almost as fast as I can find them. I have to use macOS sometimes for work and OmniWM made it bearable.
As someone who never uses spaces or any window manager, what am I actually missing? What’s wrong with cmd tab and just switching between apps?
Is this going to be some
Kind of major epiphany?!
Spaces is what used to known in Linux as virtual desktops (maybe it still is), and that is how I think of it. Or as virtual monitors. Right now I have desktop one for local system iTerm2 and Firefox, desktop two for client 1 (terminals, IntelliJ IDEA), desktop three for client 2 (VirtualBox, terminals), desktop four for incidental stuff that needs a mostly empty desktop, and desktop five for Chrome (for things that need it), and GIMP and Inkscape (as needed). This way everything stays where I put it, including which windows over which other ones. So I can switch to D1 to look up some documentation on a function, then back to D2 to use that knowledge. Or on my personal laptop I can keep my coding project up one desktop and do the daily web surfing on another, and just switch desktops to have the coding project right where I left it.
(You do use a window manager, btw, it's the thing that puts the title bars on your windows and lets you move them around. On macOS it's integrated in, but on Linux you have to choose one. There are many, all of which have some failing. Except for sawfish, whose failing is that it is no longer maintained.)
> What’s wrong with cmd tab and just switching between apps?
Open 3 terminal windows. Try to switch back & forth between just two of them with a keyboard shortcut (without mentally tracking whether or not to press Shift). You can't.
Open a browser and two terminal windows. Try to switch between one terminal (your editor) and the browser window (your reference docs), without also bringing the other terminal above the browser window, covering up your docs. You can't.
> Is this going to be some Kind of major epiphany?!
If you don't use several windows per app, probably not. But, I do, and macOS's window manager is awful for it.
> Open 3 terminal windows. Try to switch back & forth between just two of them with a keyboard shortcut
cmd+` gets me there, no problem at all
> Open a browser and two terminal windows. Try to switch terminal and the browser window, without also bringing the other terminal above the browser window
you got a point there. alt+tab is gonna surface both terminal windows above the browser.
No, this cycles between all 3 of them. As I said, I want to swap back & forth between just two of them. Extrapolate this behavior from 3 windows to 15 and you start to see the problem.
I am disappointed at the amount of negativity here. HN generally loves an experimental domain-specific language, no matter how janky. To be clear, I don't know if this is janky, but the knee-jerk anti-AI sentiment is not intellectually stimulating.
I'm not a coder, I'm a medical doctor. I see some interesting parallels in how medical students sort themselves into specialties by cognitive style to this new rift in programming with LLMs.
Some people like the deep work, some like managing a steady rain of chaos. There's no one right answer. But I'll tell you that my classmates who are happy as nephrologists are very different to the ones that are happy as transplant surgeons.
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