How To Use A Tiling Window Manager On MacOs | Yabai Ultimate Guide

In this video, I share everything you need to know to setup and use the Yabai tiling window manager on macOS. Tiling window managers are really popular on Linux environments, but with apps like Yabai and Amethyst, you can bring this functionality to macOS as well. This video is meant to be a complete guide on using and setting this up so that you can get started quickly and add this tool to your workflow to level up your window management! Hope you enjoy the video!
✍🏽 Blog Post for Reference: www.josean.com/posts/yabai-setup
🚀 My Dot Files: github.com/josean-dev/dev-env...
Help Support Me And The Channel: www.buymeacoffee.com/joseanma... 🙏🏽
Terminal Setup Video: • How To Make Your Borin...
⏰ Timestamps
00:00 - Introduction
01:20 - Built-in MacOs Settings/Shortcuts
05:04 - Installing Homebrew
06:06 - Installing Yabai & Skhd
06:21 - Configuring Yabai
10:12 - Starting Yabai
12:28 - Starting Skhd
12:55 - Configuring Skhd (Keyboard Shortcuts)
21:13 - Exploring Further
21:38 - Conclusion

[@FedericoReghini]

Amazing video like always!!🙇👏 for anyone that may encounter in the same error (v 5.0.4 ) : Error: Formula `yabai` has not implemented #plist, #service or installed a locatable service file instead of brew services start yabai brew services restart yabai use yabai --start-service yabai --restart-service Same with skhd.

[@catalinagranadosbeltran3458]

Thanks!!!!

[@joseanmartinez]

Thanks for pointing this out! Looks like this has changed from when I originally released the video.

[@malekmansouri6673]

For Error: The `yabai` formula has not implemented #plist, #service or installed a locatable service file. replace "brew services start yabai" with with "yabai --start-service".

[@victorguerra5119]

@@malekmansouri6673 worked, thanks.

[@JoshShindler]

I'm on v5.0.6. I followed this instruction, and yabai starts, but nothing happens, the windows still aren't tiled. I copied both dotfiles. How can I figure out what is going wrong?

[@dekooks1543]

Just a heads up for people watching this in 2024. yabai / shkd no longer use brew to start their respective services. The commands to run should be "yabai --start-service" and "shkd --start-service" instead. Hope this helps.

[@dteja92]

you sir, are a hero!

[@3ckortreat]

I disabled SIP but still workspace shortcuts doesn't work for me, does anyone know why?

[@adytiaisanda]

@@3ckortreat same here. somebody please help us

[@3ckortreat]

@@adytiaisanda there is a command you need to write in terminal, -sa something it solved for me

[@skidkadda]

skhd -install-service installs a launchctl service. It might not start. Copy the entire path to the service then remove it. Load it by running launchctl load and launchctl start

[@benfrainuk]

As you’re interested in productivity, you might prefer getting used to ‘ctrl+L’ to clear the terminal instead of typing ‘clear’ (it will also keep the scroll back for you which might be handy)

[@mikefdorst]

I was about to leave the exact same comment. I will add that in addition to this, I have this alias: alias cls="clear; printf '\e[3J'" which clears scrollback as well, which is handy if you have a really long compile error and you don't want to hunt for the top of it.

[@joseanmartinez]

Awesome, thanks for the tip!

[@heartdyedpurple]

@@mikefdorstyou can also do command-k to clear and clear the scroll back

[@MrMagnezone18]

@@heartdyedpurple As I understand in iTerm2 cmd-k is used to clear the buffer

[@FusionHyperion]

or just allias to "c"

[@JessePerry]

I used Yabai shortly after it came out, but then put it down a couple of years ago. Your video inspired me to pick it back up again. Thanks!

[@ellory610]

Great video. im a long time linux user, and I definitely appreciate how you explicit you are about the configurations. Been a mess to figure out how to configure window managers, etc. But you make it clear!

I am using yabai for a long time, but this video was first to inspire me to revise my config and add some more advanced thicks. Thanks!

[@dannelalbert7111]

Such a great, detailed video. I've been using yabai for a while, but with a suuuuuuuuuuuper basic setup with no hotkeys for anything. This has taken my setup to the next level. Thanks!

[@NK-eo9gi]

A tiling window manager and the related shortcuts was the last piece for me to be as productive with a mac, thanks!

[@tempsanity]

Thanks for this video, I based my config on yours before modifying some bits. Couldn't enjoy yabai on Sonoma Beta for a while due to some patch that needed to be introduced, but now I absolutely love my lunarvim/neovim + yabai + sketchybar config - the combo brings so much freshness to macOS and puts me in zen mode while coding, through the combo of vim and keyboard shortcuts in yabai.

[@joseanmartinez]

Sweet! Really happy to hear that.I've been enjoying it a lot too. I'm thinking about putting a video together about sketchy bar once I get around to trying it and setting it up.

[@dagrlx]

Excellent video, thanks for sharing your knowledge, it helped me a lot to get out of my frustration with the chaotic experience that Mac OS offers in this topic. Not all of us have a vocation to explain, you are blessed to have it.

[@aaronmcadam]

This is brilliant! I've been using Yabai for a while now but I've still not gotten around to configuring it the way I want to. So this video will help me a lot with that. Thanks!

[@joseanmartinez]

Happy to hear that!

[@yugioh8810]

I felt a bit lost with this all config at first when i was checking the original repo. but with this video now i have my setup complete and great. thank you a lot for this great video you are a life saver I love you subscribed

[@haktwld]

I just found yabai when configuring my MBP for Rust development. This video is by far, the best resource I could find for an introduction to yabai and skid. Thanks for sharing! Subbed🔔Ding!

[@erpelappel753]

This is pretty cool. I was using tidy windows since an eternity, but Yabai is even better. Thanks!1!

[@yesidev4131]

Man your content it's awesome, this week I received my MacBook Pro with m2 pro by the new company I started works, it's the first time work with Mac, and I'm fascinated with this type of programs and the entire develops ecosystem.

[@zenbrandon]

Best video for Yabai setup, hands down. My whole environment on my mac is now almost identical to yours haha! Thank you for the amazing and helpful content!

[@lennypinskiy6598]

This is an excellent video. Thank you so much for making it and introducing me to this fantastic technology!

[@RameezKhanSA]

Super clear explanation, good pacing, easy to follow along. Thanks!

[@AllenChillax]

Amazing video! Thanks a lot, I've learnt carefully and set my configurations, it works perfectly like what I want now! 😄

[@kkeith29]

I was just looking into tiling managers for Mac after seeing a lot of people use i3. Tried Amethyst but didn't like I couldn't control it programmically. Thank you for showing me Yabai. It solved my main issues with MacOS spaces which won't focus on a display when using the shortcuts if it already is visible. After trying several configurations for key maps with Yabai, I was able to make a Vim style keybinding which allows for different namespaces using SKHD modes. This allowed me to keep my leader keys similar (space for nvim, ctrl + space for tmux, and alt + space for yabai). So far it has worked great. Now I can do (alt + space > f > j) to "focus down" or (alt + space > g > t) to "goto terminal". Using Yabai's ability to label spaces has also been beneficial in making my config more clear.

[@anmiasm]

Super clear, great production quality, thanks!

[@SuperRandall420]

Glad I found this video. Coming from linux using i3wm for the past few years. Was hoping there was a decent tiling window manager. It's even looking like I can keep the same keybindings too.

[@renzodamian724]

Thanks, i 'been using this configuration as programmer with a mac who missed their old i3 linux days and it's been great.

[@joseanmartinez]

Awesome! Happy to hear that, thanks for the feedback!

[@themarksmith]

Excellent, excellent video... you explain things very well 10/10!

[@realbootybabe]

Thanks a lot! This is the basis tutorial of every tilling wm! Great :)

[@ErmandDurro]

Loved the video. Amazing content. Thank you Josean 😃

[@tuncayerman3889]

one of the great tools, well done! Thanks for sharing.

[@gokhan_onal]

Thank you for the info. I have bee looking for a tool like yabai. You saved my time because I already started to think about coding such tool :)

[@jonnywester3194]

Really very educating and inspirational!! Thank you!

[@maxreuv]

Excellent! I am currently using Amethyst but this setup you showed seems way more flexible. Thank you!

[@joseanmartinez]

Awesome! I tried Amethyst too, but ended up liking this better!

[@sspaeti]

Thanks so much for making this, and even at perfect timing. I've been using Amethyst for a while now, but they are so buggy lately that I wanted to try Yabai. Will definitely try it out now!

[@joseanmartinez]

@@sspaeti Awesome! Same here, Amethyst was a bit too buggy for me and this was working a lot better and is a lot more flexible as well.

[@eltongarcia6105]

@@joseanmartinez I am using Yabai but I am always asking myself if I should try Amethyst. A video comparing the two would be awesome so I don`t have to go into the task of install and configure Amethyst just to compare. thanks

[@carlosdelgado5632]

thank you so much for this vide, it really help 🚀the productivity

[@ilovepeaceandplaying8917]

amazing video with detailed explanations. Thanks

[@rafaelfez]

Awesome video man, thanks a lot!

[@flwi]

That was really handy to see it in action. Thanks for that nice intro!

[@joseanmartinez]

Happy to hear that, thanks!

[@codingleo]

Really good content! Thanks for sharing!

[@alonso0188]

Thank you for this video, really easy to follow as always.

[@joseanmartinez]

Awesome! Thanks for the feedback!

[@noweddev]

10/10 video! Tyvm, instant sub

[@nick-ukraine]

Thanks for the video, it was interesting for me.

[@ryansteiger6960]

This is great, thank you so much 👍 This will take a while for me to get used to 🤯

[@joseanmartinez]

Happy to hear you enjoyed the video! I'm still getting used to it too!

[@markring40]

Great video! Thank you 🙏

[@redDuck757]

Great video! Thank you a lot

[@temp2837]

Very useful video, thanks a lot

[@ryanguo13]

This video is good, thank you very much

[@jamesee3929]

Thanks for the great tutorial 👍

[@kamalkamals]

Great video and helpful, i really like the way how u explain, that's way i subscribe now, keep up!

[@lifeofmrc]

This video was insanely useful - thank you

[@joseanmartinez]

Happy to hear that! Thanks!

[@jorge28624]

I just installed it and I'm loving how good Yabai is

[@joseanmartinez]

Awesome!

[@aviadhaham5523]

wow man thank you so much for this, this tool is crazy

[@joseanmartinez]

Awesome, thanks for the feedback!

[@benarcher372]

Nice, thank you so much!

[@EmilioAyala]

excellent video. thank you!

[@nagisupercell]

Wow. This is really cool.

[@phantuananh2163]

Excellent video 🧡

[@0xc0ffee_]

I love this! The keybindings are very sensible. How do you integrate with the creation of new tabs in your terminal emulator? Do you even use that or do you just open a new terminal instance altogether?

[@dandange]

Really like your tutorials. I followed the one on iTerm2 and find it really useful. Do you have a video on your product workflow of these tutorials, i.e what tool you use for screen recording and do you do much post editing etc? If you can do a video on this that would be great.

[@cillian_scott]

Even myself as a keyboard-only fanatic love the app Swish for window management

[@abdulbasir8740]

Thank you brother

[@ThePandaGuitar]

Great tips. My favorites were the reduce motion and the hyper key

[@AlesRozmarin]

Great video, I'm using similar settings as you, I just add stackline that I can stack windows. If you are using many windows open handy.

[@joseanmartinez]

Awesome, thanks!

[@mqhg]

That’s really helpful!😊

[@joseanmartinez]

Happy to hear that, thanks!

[@zatochiSiberian]

Great! Thanks

[@vhaiker]

Your keyboard sounds very satisfying 😀

[@martinsvatek8334]

thank you!

[@thanhdang3453]

Thank you for sharing your great setup (y). For those who concerns disable `System Integrity Protection`: You may not need it. We can workaround, e.g. "Move current window to Space 1, and switch to Space 1 as well." hyper - y : yabai -m window --space 1 && osascript -e "tell application \"System Events\" to keystroke \"h\" using {command down, control down, option down, shift down}"

[@nanthilrodriguez]

Wish these sorts existed when I was getting started.

[@kingcchultz3366]

Bro it's sooo cool

[@tuananhdo1870]

reduce motion setting is gold

[@hoangtran-ek8mn]

I think it's fantastic

[@bekzatajan5602]

I use Moom for managing windows. Pretty efficient

[@maurogarcia2012]

Amazing video, as always! Do you know if yabai allows you to customize window borders so it's easier to spot the focused window? Cheers!

[@pencilcheck]

awesome!

[@mroyme]

Great video. My work system is a MacBook Pro and I use Arch with Sway on my personal laptop. The systems are so different that the change feels jarring when swapping from one to the other. This should help!

[@joseanmartinez]

Awesome!

[@8BitTorrent]

Same here! Glad I found this video, since he does such a good job of explaining every detail of the installation

[@NicolasRuizX]

One of the things I miss about my old Linux setup is i3-gaps, and since I switched to Macbook 2 years ago It still feels so slow just moving around, too many unnecessary animations. I've tried magnet and amethyst and is not the same It's like the tiling system of Gnome on Linux. Seeing this video I got my hopes again of getting my setup just like I used to have. I will definitely will try this, thanks!!

[@joseanmartinez]

Awesome!

[@wthrajat]

Did this work well for you? Also you found any alternative to i3-gaps?

[@iBrandooon]

this is literally i3WM + tmux + nvim setup on my linux :) exciting its on macOS :)

[@thebosha90]

Thanks for great tutorial and showcase. Could you please tell is it possible to enable/disable yabai only for some virtual desktop?

[@ondrejhadrava4109]

Banger!

[@user-lo9bh2cd3b]

awesome video

[@RobertMcGovernTarasis]

Definitely useful and informative video …. And terrifying :) not sure I’d remember a 1/6 of those keyboard shortcuts

[@The_Default_User]

your setup videos are top notch brother! Thank you.

[@joseanmartinez]

Appreciate the feedback, glad you enjoyed the video!

[@crowvampire]

Thanks for this video your explanation es super. What app are you using to display your keys at screen?

[@vovasava3498]

hey! how are you? I like your videos very much, please don't disappear from youtube :)

[@joseanmartinez]

Hey! Really appreciate that. I’ve been pretty busy with work, hoping to get back to making videos soon.

[@3niknicholson]

Thanks for the vid. Clear and informative. Having recently installed Void/swaywm multi-booting on my Macbook inspired me to look at yabai, thence here. I understand the appeal of a tiling wm on a large enough screen, but I don't code, my query is: what advantages does macOS have over BSD/Linux that keeps devs/coders on macOS?

[@lironglin4739]

amazing video! May I ask what app you are using to display the keystrokes🤔? It looks nite!

[@briancarmichael6748]

Great video and fan of your page. I was wondering if its possible for settings to reset after a computer restart. I ask because my tiles are re-sizing anymore.

[@danieldosen5260]

I was just checking out yabai as well - Great video and nice production value! My question after looking at the docs and watching your video - What's the `alt` key on a macos keyboard?

[@joseanmartinez]

Hey! Thanks for the feedback! “Alt” on mac is the equivalent to the “Option” key.

[@ericandresen680]

Thanks for an awesome video, I am about to het my first MacBook at woork soon and were afraide that the windows handeling on Mac would be the same as it were 10 years ago :O But this tight here looks verry promesing. One question thoguh, i use Hyper/Hyper shift as my Caps Lock key right now, both on Windows and Linux. And you say that it is possible to create the same for Mac and that i can use that for all the sgortcuts shown/configured in this video?

[@HolaMundoDev]

Que pasó? porque no hay más videos?? son muy buenos!

[@kevinzheng3987]

Amazing video! Does Yabai have the feature to stack windows?

[@sideug168]

best one

[@sonluuh]

helps me too much :D

[@iansecretario1337]

Hey man! Great video.. do you know if yabai can do similar thing like in i3 where the current active window can be centered when pressing a key and put it back when pressed again

[@miquelbotanch6170]

I love it!, but is another step in the looong way to setup everything (brew,tmux,neovim,zsh,karabiner, many others and now yabai and shkd) , but when you got it. It rocks !

[@joseanmartinez]

Definitely! It’s really up to you how far you choose to take things, but it’s pretty cool to be able to if you want to. Thanks!

[@sheaj98]

Can look into using ansible to automate some of this

[@imsergiog]

Excelente video, muchas gracias. me gusta usar tmux/neovim de igual manera, y me llama la antencion como usan i3 en linux, esto se le parece mucho, esta muy padre esta herramienta para mac. tambien me gusta usar el kinesis advantage2, es muy comod y un mx ergo mouse. estan muy buenos tus otros videos tambien. he ido alguans veces a puerto rico, tengo algunos amigos por alla. estaria padre que hablaras un poco de tu trabajo actual, que herramientas usan. tutoriales de vim estan padres, pero me gustaria verlos mas en accion creando algun proyecto sencillo usando estas herramientas. talvez estaria interesante que hicieras algun en vivo en twitch tambien. saludos !

[@ser_igel]

another tip for multiple display users: i prefer pressing H or L several times to switch between the desktops, cuz i rarely use more than 2 displays, and to implement this behaviour in yabai you can do alt - h: yabai -m window --focus west || (yabai -m display --focus west && yabai -m window --focus east) in your skhdrc (obv copy it for other keys too) idk if there's a better way cuz with this bind there's a lag when switching between displays, because it needs to wait for an error (could not locate a eastward managed window or smth like that) so it takes about 0.3 seconds longer

[@thecodesupply]

Dope!

[@LoopyLucy95]

I've just switched from a Linux system running Pop! To a macbook air and I was wondering how to do this yesterday, it's like you read my mind.

[@gonove97]

try PopOs

[@joseanmartinez]

Awesome! Glad I could help.

[@joseanmartinez]

@@gonove97 I believe you can't run that natively on Apple Silicon Macbooks as of right now.

[@ewe-studios]

What app are you using to show the keys you press, really love it.

[@jakekudur2263]

I was disappointed with my Mac after switching from Ubuntu with i3. But this video gave me hope that I can have windows tilting manager on MacOS as well.

[@lle5159]

Thanks for the video! I also find your screen wallpaper very beautiful. How may I find the same?

[@mentalmarvin]

Nice one! Very few working tutorials on yabai. Will you switch to asahi linux once it's more ready, or what keeps you on macos?

[@joseanmartinez]

Hey! Thanks! I’ve actually never made the switch to linux but am really interested in trying it out. Went from windows to mac and primarily went down the rabbit hole of neovim, tmux and now tiling window management. Once asahi linux is more ready I’ll definitely be trying it out!

[@rednil8242]

Thanks for the video. Are you tried to use yabai with macos stage manager? It seems to work pretty clumsy for me, so i'm trying to find the way of combining them in a meaningful way. Any help would be appreciated!