I was desperate.īut at the end, the desire for more control prevailed. Unable to find any alternative, I am ashamed to admit, I settled. Next, I switched to Amethyst, the most popular, free tiling window manager available on MacOS. Floating windows almost always float over each other and that made to spend all my time shifting focus from one window to another. I had tried setting custom keyboard shortcuts on MacOS, but there weren’t any options to switch between windows. I found myself using the trackpad more often than not. As soon as I got a MacBook, I searched through the alleys of the internet for respite.

This premature breakup with i3wm hit me hard. I was ready to work at Postman but I was not ready to leave the ultimate power that comes with i3wm. Having worked on solely Linux for the past 6 years and being a convicted felon for the crime to replacing Windows with Linux on any computer I could get my hands on (I actually installed Linux on a work computer assigned to me at a six months internship), I had little choice. When I started work at Postman, I was given a choice between a MacBook and a Windows laptop. The kind of control and power that i3wm provides is, in my opinion, criminal.

This aversion to mouse and trackpad (and even arrow keys) led me to a gift from heaven that we mortals call i3wm. I learnt touch-typing around that time too and that made me not want get my fingers off the home row. To avoid using it as much as I can I learnt the keyboard shortcuts of any application that I used more often than once. When I was in college I owned a Dell laptop which had a really sucky trackpad.

I3wm for macos