nikitabobko/aerospace

AeroSpace is a tiling window manager for macOS. A window manager is the part of your computer that decides where application windows go on the screen. Most desktops let windows float and overlap freely, so you spend time dragging and resizing them, a tiling window manager instead arranges windows automatically into non-overlapping panes, so the whole screen is always filled and you can rearrange the layout from the keyboard. AeroSpace is modeled on i3, a popular tiling window manager from the Linux world, and aims to bring that workflow to Mac users. Its layout is based on a tree paradigm, windows are nodes in a tree of horizontal and vertical splits, and it has its own emulation of virtual workspaces rather than using the native macOS Spaces feature, because the README says native Spaces have considerable limitations. Switching between workspaces is fast, with no animations, and it works on multi-monitor setups using the same i3-like paradigm. It is configured entirely through plain text (a default-config.toml), which makes it friendly to dotfile setups, and it is CLI-first, shipping manpages and shell completions. Notably, it does not require disabling System Integrity Protection (SIP), which many other macOS power-user tools do. You install AeroSpace through Homebrew via a custom tap (brew install --cask nikitabobko/tap/aerospace), which the README recommends because it gives you auto-updates. The app is not notarized by Apple, the Homebrew cask works around the resulting quarantine warning automatically. The project status is public beta, usable as a daily driver, but breaking changes are possible until version 1.0. It is written in Swift, aimed at advanced users and developers who want a keyboard-driven, configuration-file-based workflow, and it deliberately avoids a GUI for configuration.