Show HN: Omacosy – Omarchy-style tiling desktop for macOS, no SIP

ppaulsp about 7 hours ago 27 commentsRead Article on github.com

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I have been using omarchy on my tower since nearly a year now, shortly after it was released first. I really love the experience I am having with it but I still use my macbook for daly work, so I wanted to recreate a similar experience on it. Thats why I created omacosy, a setup for tiling windows, custom menu bar, some themes from omarchy, focus follows mouse, focus rings around windwos, some mac flavors with trackpad events and a custom mission control overview for your workspaces.

I used AeroSpace over yabai for the tiling window manager because I didnt wanted to compromise on SIP which is a mac security feature. It is supposed to be keyboard first like omarchy to move windows organize workspaces etc The setup runs around 157mb of ram and consists of AeroSpace, Karabiner (for the super key), and five small self build swift binaries.

I am running it daily on my M1 max macbook, currently on macOS26. I havent tested it much on other macbooks or macOS versions. The install script creates a manifest file to backup what was installed before and what it installed itself, the uninstall script takes that into account to clean up the macbook to exactly the state it was in before. It needs quite some permissions for it sfunctionality which I layed our in the project readme. I wanted to be really transparent about which permissions it uses and for what reason.

I would love to get some feedback or see people trying it out and hearing your opinion. Mostly about what still doesnt feel smooth in the experience or if you find any performance issues.

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Discussion (27 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

CuriouslyC•about 3 hours ago

Hyprland deserves the credit, not Omarchy. https://hypr.land/

paulsp•about 3 hours ago

Thats true, my bad hyprland is definitly what makes omarchy work so well. I should have stated that in the description.

faraazb•18 minutes ago

I have used Amethyst, Aerospace and OmniWM (using). All of these work well most of the time, but something weird is bound to happen at least a few times each day given all the possible hacking around system APIs.

paulsp•9 minutes ago

What are some of the main or repeating issues you have been running into? Like the floating window goes to the background for example.

napo•6 minutes ago

Like what? I've been using Aerospace for a while and didn't experience any issue.

aleqs•about 2 hours ago

Kind of sideways rant about tiling window managers on Marcos in general..

I mostly use Linux + dwm as my daily driver, recently added a mac into the mix (mostly for testing personal cross-platform stuff, I use macs for work mostly), and not being a fan of the macos UI in general decided to set up a tiling window manager - googling showed me AeroSpace and Yabai as the most popular options.

The experience with both of these has been quite terrible, and I don't think the problem is with these projects themselves but with macos and how it's UI/desktops work. Full screen windows seemingly break both completely. Doc hiding/showing is completely inconsistent - sometimes it just renders on top of all windows and doesn't hide other times it stays hidden even on mouse hover. Windows just disappear and can't be switched to. Fullscreen tiling seems completely unsupport(ed/able) - you must waste screen space on pointless title/status bars for some reason . After googling it turns out many of these issues exist in a fresh/bare macos and have been know unfixed issues for like 5+ years.

I can't believe there are people claiming macos has a consistent, elegant and high quality UI... it is so terribly shitty and broken

paulsp•about 2 hours ago

Yeah its a bit painful on mac. You cant have floating windows constantly in front on mac like you have on hyprland. In my implementation I added a super + s shortcut to pull any floating windows I lost to the front again. But its definitly not the nicest solution.

For fullscreen windows I also added a custom implementation with super + f that works in the workspaces setting. Just making videos fullscreen or clicking the green fullscreen button still exits the setup to macos fullscreen. The system is still kinda usable with mac fullscreen in parallel but its not a clean experience.

skupig•about 2 hours ago

>you must waste screen space on pointless title/status bars for some reason

There is macwmfx: https://github.com/aspauldingcode/macwmfx

I use it on a couple specific apps to remove title bars. You can inject it with DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES.

paulsp•about 2 hours ago

this is really cool perhaps I could integrate it or get some inspiration from it to declutter the tiling view

iLemming•about 1 hour ago

> rant about tiling window managers

MacOS is so absolutely terrible for programming work. The only coder-favorable unit on Mac that I wish Linux had a similar alternative for is the OSA layer. Nothing else is justifiable there from a software engineering standpoint. Nothing.

Apple keeps insisting on Jony Ive's influence and keeps making "an operating system for florists". Well, I'm a damn programmer - I need the utility, I don't care about stupid animations, widgets, jumping icons in the Dock, etc. If my enterprise overlords didn't push it so hard down my throat, I would be so much happier just using Linux.

purpleflame1257•about 3 hours ago

Okay very cool, will try. But please remove the claude-ese from the GitHub repo. It just erodes trust.

paulsp•about 3 hours ago

Hey thanks, I will try to get the readme more human. I am not a great writer and I wanted to have each piece explained well and in detail. Especially about the permissioning and different features. Looking forward to your experience hope you area gonna like it.

VCFundedGenYer•about 1 hour ago

Just a tip - Don't worry about not being a great writer. Trust is earned, and making AI write everything will guarantee most users won't give your project a sniff whatsoever

mplewis•29 minutes ago

Your writing is 100x better than Claude writing

orliesaurus•about 1 hour ago

Offtopic but not really: does anyone know the minimal fix on how to remove the animation between changing "desktops" in Mac OS? I want it to be instant, no slide animation. Please and Thank you

paulsp•about 1 hour ago

This setup switches instant. But on default MacOS I think the only thing similar is Accessibility > Display > Reduce Motion. But I think it doesnt remove it just makes it shorter. I am not aware of any other way.

sampsn•31 minutes ago

i have this installed and its amazing! https://github.com/jurplel/InstantSpaceSwitcher

drewbailey•about 2 hours ago

AeroSpace is really nice for i3 like tiling on macOS https://github.com/nikitabobko/AeroSpace

paulsp•about 2 hours ago

Yes this is based on AeroSpace, I used it with some custom configs and hidden commands for the tiling. This project is more about combining it with the custom menu bar, mission control, shortcuts and a few other things to get a well rounded experience.

addajones•about 3 hours ago

Great work! I'm a fan of the hyprland setup on Omarchy and also daily on Mac! Do you have any screenshots showing some of the tiling, apps running and what not? Looks excellent!

paulsp•about 3 hours ago

Yes there are 4 screenshots in the readme, it's a bit long and most of them are in the bottom. There is a plain desktop one, one for the shortcuts help menu, one tiled one and one for the custom mission control. They are in the docs folder in the repo it you just wanna check out the screenshots.

addajones•about 3 hours ago

thank you!!! I missed that sorry

paulsp•about 2 hours ago

No worries, curious if you already see things in the screenshots that could be improved.

vardalab•about 2 hours ago

How would this work on the dual monitors? Is there an option to have a secondary monitor have just one workspace while main monitor has multiple workspaces?

paulsp•about 2 hours ago

Currently I use it on two monitors, both have independent 1-9 workspaces and you can move your windows across them with shortcuts or by dragging. On my big monitor I mostly just use the first workspace.

When you plug the monitor out it collapses the workspaces and tries to fit them on empty ones on the Mac screen. It remembers the previous setup to restore them once you plug the monitor in again.

vednig•43 minutes ago

why doesn't YC fund products like this ?

paulsp•40 minutes ago

Hard to monetize I guess, omarchy and hyprland are also public domain and just build out of passion, like this project.