Macbook OSX Chunkwm

One of the things I really miss about being on Ubuntu is a tiling window manager like i3.

Homebrew

Install homebrew so you can run brew services and install packages/programs correctly.

It’s also useful if you want to install say different versions of a program (e.g. Go).

$brew info go
go: stable 1.13.1 (bottled), HEAD
Open source programming language to build simple/reliable/efficient software
https://golang.org
/usr/local/Cellar/go/1.13.1 (9,268 files, 414.0MB) *
  Poured from bottle on 2019-10-04 at 14:47:19
From: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/blob/master/Formula/go.rb
==> Requirements
Required: macOS >= 10.10 ✔
==> Options
--HEAD
    Install HEAD version
==> Analytics
install: 122,188 (30 days), 326,442 (90 days), 1,220,770 (365 days)
install_on_request: 97,701 (30 days), 256,432 (90 days), 920,590 (365 days)
build_error: 0 (30 days)

$go version
go version go1.13.1 darwin/amd64

$brew install go@1.12

$cd /usr/local/Cellar/
# you'll see go and go@1.12

$brew unlink go
$brew link go@1.12 --force
$go version
go version go1.12.10 darwin/amd64

Keyboard Preferences

Instead of running xset, on a Mac you can just modify ‘System Preferences’ -> ‘Keyboard’ and change the ‘key repeat’ to ‘fast’ and ‘delay until repeat’ to ‘short’.

Chunkwm and Skhd

Chunkwm and skhd seemed like a neat idea, but I personally found it buggy.

chunkwm is a tiling window manager
skhd is a hotkey daemon that we’ll use to setup keyboard shortcuts

Install through brew, then run with:

brew services start skhd
brew services start chunkwm

Configuration Files

Your chunkwm configuration file is in ~/.chunkwmrc Your skhd configuration file is in ~/.skhdrc

Modes

chunkwm supports three modes:

binary space partitioned (tiling) with: alt + e
monocle (full size windows stack on top of each other): alt + s
make a single window float with shift + alt + space on the focused window

Commands

Setup fullscreen with alt + f alt + h/j/k/l to move focus to the left, lower, upper, right windows alt + p to make a window float alt + t to make a window float and go to center of the screen cmd + h/j/k/l to move window to the left, lower, upper, right alt + e to toggle window type (from row to column) alt + d to destroy window

Commands (Different Windows)

shift + alt - 1 send to desktop 1 shift + alt - 2 send to desktop 2 shift + alt - 3 send to desktop 3

Amethyst

I personally like Amethyst with Fullscreen and Binary Space Partition mode.

https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst

BetterTouchTool

I like BetterTouchTool for remapping new keys and shortcuts to applications.

Spectacle

Simple Tiling

Iterm2

I change some of the keymappings for iterm2 so that:

cmd + shift + h = Previous Tab
cmd + shift + l = Next Tab
cmd + j = Select Split Pane Below
cmd + k = Select Split Pane Above
cmd + h = Select Split Pane Left
cmd + l = Select Split Pane Right
cmd + Return = Split Horizontally with Profile