I used to use Alfred, but I've since switched to using Raycast as I liked some of the UI integration a bit better. I recommend trying it out!

https://www.raycast.com/

The product is good, but there’s a lot of telemetry that I was not comfortable with given that search bar like those may see very sensitive information.

I guess that’s the modern way to approach development.

Raycast has only rudimentary file workflows. Constant efforts for monetization (VC money) and milking AI hype are just cherries on top.

There’s so much AI cruft on that page that I can’t even tell what the product is supposed to be.

Only one AI section out of 12 total sections, and while the second section has an AI example, it's only one out of five.

It's basically Alfred with more (?) functionality. Which is basically Spotlight with more functionality. Which is basically a tool to "do stuff" from anywhere on the device.

Looks interesting.. how does it compare to Launchbar?

https://www.obdev.at/products/launchbar/index.html

> - There's still no good window manager for macOS. Rectangle is as close as it gets, but it's not good IMO because it only works on non full size windows. (the solution is just get ninja-like with three finger swipe, and endure using the mouse/trackpad more than you'd prefer)

I use Magnet and it does the job well. If you're familiar with it, I'd love to know why you don't think it's a good window manager. Or do you just mean there's not a good NATIVE window manager for the OS?

+1 for magnet. Indispensable to the extent that on rare occasions I use others Macs where it’s not installed I’ll gift it to them (and they invariably become passionate about it).

I only tried the intersection of 'free' and 'trusted' (the latter being subjective, based on a glance at website/repo). I hadn't yet tried Magnet, but I see it's $5 so I'll splash out over the weekend and give it a try. Thanks for the rec! Any newb tips appreciated.

I used to use tiling window managers on Linux, but I found out that my Mac usage contains lots of “graphical” apps that don't like to live in a quarter of the screen or something like that.

So I've embraced overlapping windows. I strategically place them so that the import parts are visible. For example, my IDE is full screen, but the browser is only 70% with and height or so (so that the left 30% and the bottom 30% of the IDE are visible, which conveniently lets me peek into the log of the currently running program.

I have a Hammerspoon configuration that conjures up a modal window on a keypress, and then additional keypresses move the current window to a predefined position and size, e.g. m to maximize and p for the top right corner (70% width and 70% height).

I also have some keybindings in that modal window to jump to an app, e.g. w for the browser, i for the IDE, t for the email client, space for the terminal.

I very very rarely manually move a window around, one of the preset positions/sizes usually works for me.

> I've embraced overlapping windows.

Same. My eyesight getting worse has been a big factor for me. The days of having all my active tools neatly organized and visible simultaneously is over, even with multiple large monitors.

Why not just have all your windows fullscreen and three finger swipe between them like macOS was designed to be used. If you dont like the extremely opinionated macOS window design why not just use Linux?

> There's still no good window manager for macOS. Rectangle is as close as it gets, but it's not good IMO because it only works on non full size windows. (the solution is just get ninja-like with three finger swipe, and endure using the mouse/trackpad more than you'd prefer)

I don’t know your requirements for good, but I like Mizage’s Divvy. Works on Mac and Windows and can configure gTile similarly on Linux.

Aerospace tiling window manager is amazing

I agree, aerospace is great! I'm surprised I don't hear of it more often. I'm recent convert to MacOS and was surprised at how bad the window management was by default, but aerospace fixed that right up.

Used Divvy for years, but switched to Moom last year and I’m very happy with it. One feature I particularly like is being able to set up “chains” of window positions to a single shortcut, so you can trigger it multiple times and it will cycle through different positions. I do miss the little grid layout window a bit, but Moom works a lot better for me overall.

Divvy+Stay is the magic combo for me: https://cordlessdog.com/stay/ (moves windows back to my external monitor when I plug it in)

Divvy is great, still working, yet development seems abandoned.

I've been using the Amethyst window manager for ~10 years. It's open-source and generally works well, though it occasionally requires a restart (the app, not the OS)

You should check out aerospace, much better than amethyst or yabai IMO

Have you tried out aerospace as window manager (https://github.com/nikitabobko/AeroSpace) ?

I’ve tried multiple different tools, but none really felt right - probably because I was using i3 on my desktop. And then I found aerospace, which is inspired by i3 and uses a lot of clever tricks to achieve this

AeroSpace is really nice, when it works. As soon as I use more of CPU, for example to compile something, it gets unusably slow, as in 5 seconds to do anything slow. The worst part is that the workspaces are virtual, so when you kill it, you're left with a tens of pixel-sized windows in Mission Control.

So I went back to yabai. It gets the jobs done fine.

Aerospace works pretty well, but has an issue that was a deal breaker to me, in apps that uses native tabs are not displayed as expected [0]

[0] https://github.com/nikitabobko/AeroSpace/issues/68

I lived with Alfred for many-many years, but Raycast seems much better this days. Simpler yet richer and constantly developed, many plugins, it's simple to do your own and... it has window manager

Is Raycast open source at all? With nearly $50M of funding (most recently $30M series B last fall) I have to wonder about the long term sustainability and whether I want to invest my time and workflows into the whims of a VC backed “free forever” plan.

Alfred has been around for ages and I’m reasonably confident the developers aren’t going to screw me.

This is a concern of mine as well. Alfred is also just so ridiculously lightweight and efficient compared to, well, everything these days. At 18MB on disk and sitting at 0% CPU and 42MB RAM on my machine right now with no spread of support processes, it feels almost like an endangered species Tiger-era Mac app that’s managed to survive to the current day.

As much as I'd like to imagine investors are shoveling money into a pit because they want us to have nice software, the sheer amount of money feels like the only two options are (A) to reach profitability we're raising prices way up to juice the people who have become dependent on Raycast when it was affordable, or (B) blah blah incredible journey, our team is being acquihired for a sort of related project and Raycast will slowly wither and die as we realign priorities with the people who pay us.

I'm sure they'd like to squeeze Alfred and other competitors out of existence while they have the VC runway to underprice their software, but I'm not going to help them do that.

I should upgrade mine. I was on Alfred 3 before using Raycast.

It’s positively comedic that Bluesky, an entire large social network has taken less funding ($36M according to [1]) compared to Raycast (… an application launcher).

[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/bluesky-514d#financi...

Development has been slow lately, but Quicksilver[0] is still around as a FOSS alternative. We have an upcoming release that should refresh things a bit for Seqouia.

[0]: https://github.com/quicksilver/Quicksilver

Launchbar[0] is also still around - not actively developed, but actively maintained. Happy user since 10 years already, even though I own a lifetime Alfred license.

[0]: https://obdev.at/products/launchbar/index.html

I went from Alfred to Raycast and then back again. They're both great, but I prefer Alfred. To each their own!

Other good windows management options are Hammerspoon and BetterTouchTool:

https://www.hammerspoon.org/Spoons/MiroWindowsManager.html

https://folivora.ai/

Default osx spotlight search is just as good as Alfred? What’s different?

Agreed. Spotlight search does quite well for me. I think there is a discoverability problem with native mac functionality. People tend to install lots of software that duplicates native features

> install lots of software that duplicates native features

I installed some software for key remapping and window tiling (karabiner and rectangle) when I couldn't figure out how to do it natively. You seem like you know what you're talking about; do you happen to have native recommendations?

Welp. I don't know what I'm talking about. But at least for key remapping, I use `hidutil`. For example, to remap right ctrl to fn:

  hidutil property --set '
    {
      "UserKeyMapping": [
        {
          "HIDKeyboardModifierMappingSrc": 0x7000000E4,
          "HIDKeyboardModifierMappingDst": 0xFF00000003
        }
      ]
    }
  '

To make it stick through reboots, you can run it in a launch agent. Posted my notes and plist file here: https://gist.github.com/andelink/9df452c8cafb6790f196277705c...

For window tiling, can't say I've ever looked into it.

I was using Karabiner for years just to remap caps to a hyper key. A few months ago replaced it with a launchagent to run something like this remapping caps to F19 (and using F19 instead of hyper, in hammerspoon) -- has been working great.

I have no problems with Spotlight search. I use Alfred for the plug-ins, it's extensibility, workflows, clipboard history, everything else it can do.

Alfred search, in fact, really irritates me in that I've not found a good way to limit the search space. No, I really don't want files inside various node_modules folders filling up the search results. <Sigh> I'll try Spotlight, or go directory traversing, again. Anyone have a solution for that?

I'm on Sonoma (14.5). In System Settings > Siri & Spotlight,

1. I can deselect some pre-defined categories that Spotlight searches

2. I can click the "Spotlight Privacy..." button (at the very bottom right). Then I can add folders for it to ignore.

(My preference is for Spotlight to ignore almost everything, so that it isn't indexing stuff and eating CPU on this old Macbook Air. I only have it scan Applications, Calculator, and System Settings. I have it specifically ignore my entire home directory which is where all my git repos are.)

Are you saying that if I limit the Spotlight search space then Alfred will follow? Makes sense, if it's relying on Spotlight's index. I'll give it a try.

Spotlight search seems to have gotten better, while Alfred search has had me rebuild my index more than just a few times and it doesn't cope well with nested directories.

Something happened in 15.1 onwards for me where Spotlight has become way faster and way better. But yes, Alfred used to dominate in search and speed as well.

I tried reindexing a few times (each took a few hours) but spotlight search still rarely brought up the file/thing I was after. Examples:

Spotlight search would bring up a wikipedia entry for app store instead of the app store on my laptop: https://imgur.com/QV1w7Kq

Typing 'finder' and hitting enter (e.g. to browse for a file), would open finder settings, rather than finder itself.

I haven't used it in ~1 year, those are a couple of examples I can recall.

Alfred does a lot more beyond just searching.

Very true, for me, spotlight search felt so broken that Alfred would be worth it even if search was all it did.

Such as?

I should do a lot more with Alfred, but apart from using it as a launcher my most used feature is the clipboard search. After invoking it by typing 'clip' into the box, I get an incremental search on all clipboard contents it has tracked, and can re-copy any of those items to the current clipboard by pressing enter. Very useful and efficient when it's part of your workflow.

One thing that’s been annoying me about desktop/window management is that whenever I’ve organized my windows that I need for one project on one desktop, I eventually need to upgrade vscode or warp or macOS needs to be updated. And then restarting an app it forgets on which desktop each window was running… I typically have 3-5 projects open that I switch between (and trying to organize them on different desktops has been sort of futile.)

Anyone know how to pin a window to a desktop so that it remembers this across restarts?

Right click on the app icon in the dock → Options → Assign to: This Desktop.

Fwiw I hear good things about aerospace but haven’t yet had a chance to give it a shot.

I wanted to like it, but like all tiling window managers for macOS, it feels too tacked on and janky. For instance, Finder tabs simply aren't possible when using Aerospace.

I settled for Cmd+Ctrl+[h|j|k|l] window snapping via Hammerspoon, and let my Arch/Hyprland box keep the tiling window manager.

aerospace is good!

I've recently switched from Amethyst to Aerospace and am really liking it

Came here to recommend aerospace. It’s been amazing. My whole desktop is like a tmux session now.

It’s very much changed how I work/use my computer. More than Rectangle did, more than LLMs have.

(I still adore hookshot/rectangle though :)

I used Yabai for years until I found aerospace, and switched over instantly. Would highly recommend anyone to try it :)

What does aerospace provide that yabai can't? I'm using yabai pretty much like I used to in Arch with i3

I’ve never used yabai or i3. I think the docs/defaults/configurations just really sold me on aerospace. yabai never really caught my eye. I’ve never seriously used Linux

I also think Aerospace was positioned as “macOS native features only” which helped sell me on it. Aka no hacks or workarounds

Aerospace is much better than yabai especially workspaces feature without disabling SIP

I'm using yabai with SIP enabled. The only thing that is missing is sending a window to another workspace. To do that I launch Mission Control and simply drag the window to desired workspace. It turns out I don't do that often so I can live with that.

The workspaces feature in Aerospace is phenomenal and so much better than native macOS workspaces. I highly recommend it. Also the accordion layout of aerospace is better than Yabai’s stacks, and the way that resizing windows works is also better

I tried it, it's nice. There's an issue where high CPU usage makes it unusable though, last time I checked it was still open. Will probably try again in future.

I was able to get around this using renice to up the scheduler priority of the aerospace process.

I find rectangle to be pretty good after needing a replacement for sizeup when development stopped there. My solution is to just ignore the existence of the full screen windows in favor of using the max window size shortcut to fill the current display. Then I can send a window to another display or resize it with shortcuts that are easy enough to get used to and avoid all the transitions that take seconds. The whole full screen experience is so bad otherwise, and this is from someone that is very used to the trackpad and all their gestures.

I have found simple hammerspoon scripts to be a great alternative to a windows manager. You can map keys to some parts of the screen. It also supports multi-display systems.

I just made my own window manager with Hammerspoon. First I copied whatever rectangle/magnet was doing and then added my own logic on top of it to fit the style I work with windows.

As a bonus I can hit hyper-l (L for layout) and it'll open the correct apps + place them correctly depending on where I am and how many monitors are connected.

And caps-lock is of course mapped as hyper with Karabiner Elements, it even has a preset for it.

Is your config publicly avail anywhere?

Also, I was only using Karabiner for caps remapping and was able to satisfactorily replace it with this type of built-in hidutil call: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43203239 -- remaps to F19, which I use as a hyper modal in hammerspoon. Works well, and I was happy to let go of Karabiner given how deeply it has to dig into the OS, and I wasn't using any of its more powerful features anyway.

I did the same, though I'd modeled my setup after my prior swaywm workflow. Hammerspoon was really the only thing that made macos usable for me.

Brightintosh is the same as Vivid (roughly) and is actually open source, but the author ships the binaries as a Mac app store purchase for $2:

https://github.com/niklasr22/BrightIntosh

I've been using SizeUp for window management on macOS for...15 years now I think? https://www.irradiatedsoftware.com/sizeup/

I've been using SizeUp for 15 years too, but I just switched to Rectangle a few months ago. Mostly because it's faster. You wouldn't think it matters, but for some reason it does.

Magnet is pretty good for window management, IMO.

Spotlight has ALWAYS been terrible...