In my personal experience, tiling window managers only work when you have a lot of screen real estate. I tried using yabai on a 13 inch m2 air, but I ended up going back to my normal workflow of just alt tabbing between windows. Most apps don’t let you see enough content when they are tiled (because of gui elements such as sidebar etc). I do love the “focus on hover” feature of yabai though. I wish macOS had that natively.
I've been using Amethyst for multiple years on only the builtin display as well.
I think the key here is to use multiple desktops (or are they called workspaces?). If I'm working on a single screen I constantly have 10 desktops open, with a quite consistent setup between them (e.g. first desktop is fullscreen browser, second screen is 3-5 tiled terminals, ...). All the applications I'm "actively" using are usually on the first 2-4 desktops with a lot of screen real estate for each of them.
What really helps here is assigning one of the screen corners as a hot corner that goes to Expose mode where you can switch between screens, as well as assigning shortcuts for switching between desktops and moving windows between them (the moving windows shortcuts are usually part of your window manager). Selecting "Reduced Motion" in the accessibility settings also helps by speeding up the desktop switching animations.
I would love a tiling manager that allowed you to "full screen" the app into the tile of your choice.
By that, I mean the app would snap to the edges and lose all the chrome that is normal present. So your browser window, for instance, would lose the borders and url bar until you moused to the top of the tile.
kinda like a deterministic alt+tab, you set up the layout of "workspaces" and they're always in the same place
you can also pin windows to always open in the same place, so you basically can have persistent layouts that you create while using them (not like powertools where you have to set up the layouts to use them later)
I keep getting annoyed at alt+tab because I accidentally clicked on another window and now the order is messed up
I'm still bitter about macOS removing 2D "workspaces". When I was on a 13" I could work just fine by having my browser in the center of 3x3, code to the right, chat down, DB browser left, and I can't remember what I put "up". I vaguely remember using the "diagonals" for something, maybe TweetDeck or similar?
It was _so_ much better than just a 1D list of workspaces. I could get to any of my main 5 spaces with 1-2 key presses max. I've completely ignored spaces since they took that away especially since I think it reorders them automatically or something like that? I have zero desire for "smart spaces" or anything like that. I want deterministic. Now I just run multiple monitors and I'm happy with that but I miss the 2D grid for spaces on just a laptop.
On a 27” monitor running at 2560x1440 1x/2x tiling is better than on a small screen, but it still winds up awkwardly sizing windows from time to time. In most cases I find it easier to just let windows overlap, which results in the same information visibility but lets windows retain proper sizing.
I could see tiling working if I lived in minimal-chrome apps like Terminal and Sublime, but I don’t, and so floating with occasional tiling works better for me.
I used to use i3 on a ThinkPad x220 and agree that they are less useful on small screens.
My experience is that they are also just productivity theater. You feel more productive with the snazzy shortcuts but its very rare for the bottleneck in a workflow to be window management. Most people probably lose more time overall managing their config files and looking up the shortcuts they forgot.
You can use a separate utility named “AutoRaise” to get autoraise and autofocus functionalities without having to rely on yabai for these.
https://github.com/sbmpost/AutoRaise
