AeroSpace Beta

AeroSpace is an i3-like tiling window manager for macOS

Videos:

• YouTube 91 sec Demo
• YouTube Guide by Josean Martinez

Docs:

• AeroSpace Guide
• AeroSpace Commands
• AeroSpace Goodies

Key features

• Tiling window manager based on a tree paradigm
• i3 inspired
• Fast workspaces switching without animations and without the necessity to disable SIP
• AeroSpace employs its own emulation of virtual workspaces instead of relying on native macOS Spaces due to their considerable limitations
• Plain text configuration (dotfiles friendly). See: default-config.toml
• CLI first (manpages and shell completion included)
• Doesn't require disabling SIP (System Integrity Protection)
• Proper multi-monitor support (i3-like paradigm)

Installation

Install via Homebrew to get autoupdates (Preferred)

brew install --cask nikitabobko/tap/aerospace

In multi-monitor setup please make sure that monitors are properly arranged.

Other installation options: https://nikitabobko.github.io/AeroSpace/guide#installation

[!NOTE] By using AeroSpace, you acknowledge that it's not notarized.

Notarization is a "security" feature by Apple. You send binaries to Apple, and they either approve them or not. In reality, notarization is about building binaries the way Apple likes it.

I don't have anything against notarization as a concept. I specifically don't like the way Apple does notarization. I don't have time to deal with Apple.

Homebrew installation script is configured to automatically delete com.apple.quarantine attribute, that's why the app should work out of the box, without any warnings that "Apple cannot check AeroSpace for malicious software"

Community, discussions, issues

AeroSpace project doesn't accept Issues directly - we ask you to create a Discussion first. Please read CONTRIBUTING.md for more details.

Community discussions happen at GitHub Discussions. There you can discuss bugs, propose new features, ask your questions, show off your setup, or just chat.

There are 7 channels:

• #all. RSS. Feed with all discussions.
• #announcements. RSS. Only maintainers can post here. Highly moderated traffic.
• #announcements-releases. RSS. Announcements about non-patch releases. Only maintainers can post here.
• #feature-ideas. RSS.
• #general. RSS.
• #potential-bugs. RSS. If you think that you have encountered a bug, you can discuss your bugs here.
• #questions-and-answers. RSS. Everyone is welcome to ask questions. Everyone is encouraged to answer other people's questions.

Project status

Public Beta. AeroSpace can be used as a daily driver, but expect breaking changes until 1.0 is reached.

What stops us from 1.0 release:

• https://github.com/nikitabobko/AeroSpace/issues/131 Performance. Implement thread-per-application to circumvent macOS blocking AX API.
• https://github.com/nikitabobko/AeroSpace/issues/1215 Big refactoring. Rewrite mutable double-linked core tree data structure to immutable single-linked persistent tree. Important for: stability and potential performance
  • https://github.com/nikitabobko/AeroSpace/issues/1216 The big refactoring will help us to fix stability issue that windows may randomly jump to the focused workspace
  • https://github.com/nikitabobko/AeroSpace/issues/68 The big refactoring will help us to support macOS native tabs
• https://github.com/nikitabobko/AeroSpace/issues/278 Implement shell-like combinators. Ignore a lot of crazy fuss in the issue, We are most probably going with the minimal approach to only introduce common shell-combinators: ||, &&, ; and eval command to send multiple commands in one go.
• https://github.com/nikitabobko/AeroSpace/issues/1012 Investigate a possibility to use CGEvent.tapCreate API for global hotkeys
  • https://github.com/nikitabobko/AeroSpace/issues/28 Maybe it will allow to distinguish left and right modifiers. Maybe not

Big and important issues which will go after 1.0 release:

• https://github.com/nikitabobko/AeroSpace/issues/2 sticky windows
• https://github.com/nikitabobko/AeroSpace/issues/260 Dynamic TWM

Development

A notes on how to setup the project, build it, how to run the tests, etc. can be found here: dev-docs/development.md

Project values

Values

• AeroSpace is targeted at advanced users and developers
• Keyboard centric
• Breaking changes (configuration files, CLI, behavior) are avoided as much as possible, but it must not let the software stagnate. Thus breaking changes can happen, but with careful considerations and helpful message. Semver major version is bumped in case of a breaking change (It's all guaranteed once AeroSpace reaches 1.0 version, until then breaking changes just happen)
• AeroSpace doesn't use GUI, unless necessarily
  • AeroSpace will never provide a GUI for configuration. For advanced users, it's easier to edit a configuration file in text editor rather than navigating through checkboxes in GUI.
  • Status menu icon is ok, because visual feedback is needed
• Provide practical features. Fancy appearance features are not practical (e.g. window borders, transparency, animations, etc.)
• "dark magic" (aka "private APIs", "code injections", etc.) must be avoided as much as possible
  • Right now, AeroSpace uses only a single private API to get window ID of accessibility object _AXUIElementGetWindow. Everything else is macOS public accessibility API.
  • AeroSpace will never require you to disable SIP (System Integrity Protection).
  • The goal is to make AeroSpace easily maintainable, and resistant to macOS updates.

Non Values

• Play nicely with existing macOS features. If limitations are imposed then AeroSpace won't play nicely with existing macOS features (For example, AeroSpace doesn't acknowledge the existence of macOS Spaces, and it uses emulation of its own workspaces)
• Ricing. AeroSpace provides only a very minimal support for ricing - gaps and a few callbacks for integrations with bars. The current maintainer doesn't care about ricing. Ricing issues are not a priority, and they are mostly ignored. The ricing stance can change only with the appearance of more maintainers.

macOS compatibility table

• AeroSpace binary runs on: macOS 13+
• AeroSpace debug build from sources is supported on: macOS 14+
• AeroSpace release build from sources is supported on: macOS 15+ (Requires Xcode 26+)

Sponsorship

AeroSpace is developed and maintained in my free time. If you find it useful, consider sponsoring.

People who have write access

In alphabetical order:

• @mobile-ar
• @nikitabobko
• @rickyz

Tip of the day

defaults write -g NSWindowShouldDragOnGesture -bool true

Now, you can move windows by holding ctrl+cmd and dragging any part of the window (not necessarily the window title)

Source: reddit

Related projects

• Amethyst - tiling window manager à la xmonad
• InstantSpaceSwitcher - Instant space switching by synthesizing trackpad gesture with an artificially high velocity
• yabai - a tiling window manager for macOS based on binary space partitioning