![]() It does make huge changes in how I work with windows and Spaces. And I continue to like it, the morning of day 2. ![]() Then I can flip from that Space to a different one where I do email or have a Zoom meeting or take a social media break or whatever.Īmethyst survived its first full day of contact with the enemy work. For years, I never used Spaces, but for the past year or so I find myself using them often for one particular case: As I said, I am a nonfiction writer by trade, and I’ll create a Space which contains my text editor on the right half of the screen, and my notes or a browser window on the left half. The one thing I really like about Amethyst that I may not be able to get elsewhere is the ability to use a keyboard shortcut to automatically send a window to another Space. My first full day with Amethyst will be tomorrow I give myself a 50-50 chance of lasting the whole day with it. More recently, I set up more shortcuts - Ctrl-Cmd-M followed by numerals 1, 2, 3 or 4 would move a window to one of the four corners of the screen. I’d type Ctrl-Cmd-M to activate Moom, then Cmd-Left-Arrow or Cmd-Right-Arrow to move a window to the left or right half of the screen. Even if you preprogram keyboard shortcuts to move a window into a precise size and position, you have to use keyboard shortcuts to get there.įor some time I’ve had keyboard shortcuts set for Moom to approximate tiling. Moom doesn’t do the automatic-window-moving-and-tiling that Amethyst does. I have Moom configured to move windows to half-screen or quarter-screen and that may be all I need to do. I suspect I may end up just sticking with Moom. I know I have Post-It notes somewhere in my office… ![]() And then find some way to write down the keyboard shortcuts I need until I have them memorized. I suspect I’m going to want to open about a dozen windows on my Mac one day when I have time and start playing around with the keyboard shortcuts. It’s not how I’m used to working, but I’m OK with giving that a try. “Throw focused windows”? What the heck does that mean? “Toggle global tiling”? “Move focus to counter clockwise screen”? This might as well be Klingon.Īmethyst seems to assume you’re working in multiple Spaces, with individual groups of windows in each Space. That’s a problem for me because I can’t remember keyboard shortcuts as easily as many Mac power users seem to be able to.Īlso, the language used to describe the keyboard shortcuts is opaque. And keyboard shortcuts seem to be the only way to control Amethyst. Returning to Amethyst | ianyh for a moment - that page has a list of keyboard shortcuts for controlling Amethyst, That list is enormous, with seemingly dozens and dozens of possible combinations. This essay on Medium is enough to get me started: ![]() Which the developer himself concedes is “rough.” A friend once said that Unix documentation was written for people with nearly perfect memories who already understood what they needed to do Amethyst is like that. I have looked at Amethyst many times but never even installed it because it is so darn confusing. When you open a new app window, all the other windows automatically resize and get out of the way to fit in a neat mosaic of rectangles. That makes no sense to me - what do you want to see your desktop for? It never changes!Īmethyst automates that whole process of resizing windows and moving them. I gather this is very un-Mac-user like most Mac users have windows taking up only a portion of the screen. I go for weeks without even seeing my desktop. In all those cases, I rarely have even a single pixel of desktop showing. Sometimes while I’m writing somebody messages me and I’ll open a third window, containing the message thread. I’m a nonfiction writer by trade, and one window will contain my writing in progress while the other window has notes. ![]() Often I have two windows, side-by-side vertically. I usually work in one maximized window, for whatever app I’m in - email, Safari, whatever. Tiling seems like exactly the way I would like to use windows on the Mac. It takes an unusual approach to window management, called “tiling,” which I gather is commonplace in Linux but not very Mac-like at all. I’ve been intrigued by the Amethyst window manager ever since I heard about it, quite some time ago. ![]()
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