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I recently purchased a MacBook, and while I'm thoroughly impressed with the hardware, I find the keyboard navigation in the desktop environment somewhat lacking

I recently purchased a MacBook, and while I'm thoroughly impressed with the hardware, I find the keyboard navigation in the desktop environment somewhat lacking in comparison to my previous experience. Having used Linux Pop OS for many years, I've grown accustomed to the intuitive and powerful tiling window manager and keyboard navigation shortcuts it offers. I'm struggling to find a comparable solution on the macOS platform.

richbell 3y ago
It's a sore-spot for sure. I've found that Rectangle[0] does a good enough job. [0] https://rectangleapp.com/ https://rectangleapp.com/
- arthurcolle 3y ago
  Magnet is also pretty good
- AlchemistCamp 3y ago
  I’m a very happy user of Rectangle, as well.
- httpteapot 3y ago
  Does Rectangle has a shortcut to switch the focused window in a split screen?
  - wtvanhest 3y ago
    I’ve kind of solved this. You can snap windows but you need to add a shortcut in systems to do it. It’s not perfect, but it does work and overtime you miss it less and less
  - walthamstow 3y ago
    No but Amethyst does https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - hirvi74 3y ago
    Hammerspoon can do it for I have it in my config. I also have it so I can switch to open windows on the same Space (I can throw windows into a tiled view and jump around to them). It's extremely flexible if you are willing to play around with it.
- dcchambers 3y ago
  Rectangle is so good - it's the first thing I recommend anyone new to MacOS download. I don't know why apple hasn't implemented this natively.
- snowe2010 3y ago
  Hammerspoon is by far the best option for devs, it’s more powerful than pretty much every solution out there, including better touch tool, and the only additional software I need is karabiner elements and alttab. Those three pieces of software will solve every single problem you have with Mac.
alin23 3y ago
You can mimic that in part with yabai (https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai). Disabling SIP gets you instant Space switching and creating without animation just like Pop_OS. But you can get very far to an automated tiling WM and keyboard navigation even without disabling SIP.
- bartvk 3y ago
  Just because this often comes up; I don't want to disable SIP. However I'm very happy with yabai.
  - foxandmouse 3y ago
    I didn't realize it was possible to use it without disabling SIP, excited to give it another shot! AltTab with a few modifications is currently my preferred way to manage windows.
    - bartvk 3y ago
      To be honest I always wrote off Yabai until someone here commented that it works fine without disabling SIP. Only a small subset of features need that.
userbinator 3y ago
I suspect the constant emphasis on mouse use, ever since the first Macintosh, has created an attitude of "keyboard doesn't matter"; I've noticed that even early Windows is very usable with only a keyboard (the Alt, underlined letters, and arrow keys method is particularly well-designed), whereas e.g. classic MacOS is basically unusable without a mouse. In later versions they added keyboard access, but it still feels like it was done as a bare-minimum concession and not originally planned.
- eitland 3y ago
  My observation too. It is kind of evolution, just for computers. Macs early developed good pointing devices and as a result many keyboard related aspects can afford to be somewhere between weird and crazy. Bonus for Mac people insisting everything is fine. And I still consider getting a MacBook Pro next month, Windows PCs are that bad even with WSL :-/ Edit: at least these days, fn and ctrl can finally be remapped and CMD-tab can be fixed so it works consistently between two Firefox (or two Safari) windows, an IDE and Finder. It used to be that I would have to CMD-tab to the Firefox group, then CMD-| to get to the correct browser window and it was one of the things that truly messed up my workdays the last time I used Mac back in 2012. (No dedicated home/end buttons and every app seemingly being free to choose what shortcut they would use for it was probably the most painful one though.)
- troyvit 3y ago
  I had the opposite experience with MacOS. I hold every OS I've used since the early aughts up against MacOS 9 and they are all lacking in terms of keyboard navigation. Maybe it was because I had the previous 10 years to practice, but I felt I could do almost anything in pre-OSX MacOS with the keyboard, only relying on the mouse for application-specific stuff like photo editing. Navigating, filtering, opening files and folders were all incredibly easy. In KDE it's pretty much a joke every time I have to save-as. Can't even get through that filesystem menu without a mouse unless it supports <ctrl>-l. Dolphin is slightly better, especially if you enable the console pane to make it easier to switch to the command line, but it's still way behind Apple's finder from 1999.
  - 3y ago
Trufa 3y ago
As a more general suggestion, macOS likely isn’t good at imitating what you previously had, try to understand the workflow they’re proposing, adapt and learn it, it generally gets second nature and pretty decent soon enough, getting to work the way you envision is not apple’s strong suit.
- httpteapot 3y ago
  Do you know some good ressources to learn how to use macOS the productive way, using mostly keyboard shortcuts instead of the trackpad?
  - kashunstva 3y ago
    Apple maintains a list of macOS keyboard shortcuts that might be useful: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201236 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201236
  - snowe2010 3y ago
    You can use hammerspoon to solve almost every issue you have.
- nsonha 3y ago
  Classic blame the user kind of argument, what is the alternative workflow to "snap windows with a hotkey" then?
  - Tagbert 3y ago
    The point is that when switching OSs you are going to run into lots of places where the new OS does things differently that what you are used to. Your choice is to fight the new OS and try to keep doing things the way you are used to or embrace the new OS and learn some new workflows. That doesn’t mean adopting everything or abandoning everything, just try to be flexible and try some different things out. Just because it is different doesn’t mean it is broken. For window management there are dozens (at least) third party tools that add features like snap window. Try some out to see what you like. Rectangle, Magnet, Moom, BetterSnapTool come to mind but here are others.
dan-robertson 3y ago
I don’t really tile windows much. The main case where I do is with a bunch of terminal windows. Most of what I get out of a tiling window manager is full screen by default and easy keys to switch workspaces. On macOS the thing that drives me insane is that the many-finger swipe to switch desktops won’t focus the target window until the animation is totally done (like 0.7s after starting). I wish it works like cmd+tab which changes focus instantly. Apart from that I guess I’m not that bothered because I mostly just full screen things. Emacs and iterm2 can do their own tiling of windows.
- kps 3y ago
  I am not sure whether it applies to this case, but you might try turning on ‘Reduce motion’ under the Accessibility settings, which eliminates some animation delays.
  - dan-robertson 3y ago
    Reduce motion changes the animation to fade-in fade-out but updating focus is still delayed
- voltaireodactyl 3y ago
  Just a heads up — you can solve that one annoyance; there are terminal commands that will reduce that animation to instantaneous.
  - dan-robertson 3y ago
    I tried changing various defaults but lots of them seemed to no longer work. Maybe I only tried the options to increase the speed or I didn’t restart enough things or I spelled something wrong. I also tried looking at the binaries for relevant-looking names of defaults to change and didn’t find any (including the options that old internet advice recommended changing)
    - mthoms 3y ago
      The keyboard shortcuts to do this animate much quicker than the swipe does. In the past I've set up BetterTouchTool to press the corresponding key on left and right swipes. The only disadvantage is that there is no way to "peek" the previous desktop like you can with the built in swipes.
illiarian 3y ago
Divvy for window management (assign your own shortcut). For almost everything else there's a standardized system-wide shortcut (including the ancient ones like Ctrl+a/e for text). If there isn't a shortcut, but the app exposes the action in a menu, you can assign a custom shortcut from keyboard settings. MacOS has traditionally been very friendly to keyboard navigation. Well, until somewhat recently when mobile-only/mobile-first devs started just slapping Catalyst on and calling it a day. Even Apple's own apps suffer from this.
- kitsunesoba 3y ago
  > If there isn't a shortcut, but the app exposes the action in a menu, you can assign a custom shortcut from keyboard settings. The standardized menu system is underrated, IMO. Setting aside preferences for the menubar being global vs. being attached to app windows, the fact that it's system-owned makes features like this possible. Apple was able to implement custom keybinds for menu items in arbitrary apps because they know that 99.9% of apps use the system menubar. This would be next to impossible on Windows where menubar implementations are disparate and numerous (even within first party apps), and while something similar could be patched together on Linux, it'd only work on some (mostly Qt) apps since GTK has mostly abandoned menus altogether. This also enables the menu search in macOS Help menus to work, which is underused despite being basically a command palette for every app.
  - koinedad 3y ago
    Menu bar search is underused for sure. One of my top commands after I learned about it.
jen729w 3y ago
I’ll just throw Magnet in the ring for a tiling solution. I have keyboard shortcuts well in muscle memory now for left/right third/half/two-thirds, and all four corners at a quarter of screen, and full screen. I find that meets 90% of my needs. Left/right two-thirds is my go-to when coding on 14”. VSCode on the left, Safari on the right. Both big enough to work well, but both leave enough of the other visible to be useful. Nice little app, costs some reasonable amount of money as a one-off purchase.
- orf 3y ago
  I use Magnet, but settings not syncing across devices is a bit annoying.
- snowe2010 3y ago
  Hammerspoon can handle that and much more, way more customizable and you can do amazing things like grid layouts. Completely open source, totally free, and the more people that use it the better it gets so I highly recommend it.
taspeotis 3y ago
Yeah I find some of the shortcuts confusing, like if I want to enter a directory in Finder I push ENTER and that's ... rename? Instead I'm meant to push PLACE OF INTEREST SIGN + O
- lmz 3y ago
  Cmd-down would also work.
- eviks 3y ago
  Oh yeah, that's a stupid keybind, made worse by the fact you can't reliably change it since you can't differentiate when you're in a text field But then you can mostly get by with a finder alternative
Tagbert 3y ago
You are probably better off ignoring Apples built in Window management controls unless you really like the way “Spaces” work. I find them too restrictive. Same with the green icon “full screen” mode. As others have mentioned, there are tones of third part tools that manage windows in various ways and you’ll probably find one that works for you.
rovr138 3y ago
As another suggestion, Better Touch Tool does great for tiling window manager and adding shortcuts. It's one of the first things I always need. It started coming from Linux with a similar experience to you. ---- A big shortcut for me is cmd+shift+/ It allows searching on all submenus. So when I'm working on an IDE for example, it's how I find those obscure options I know are there but I don't use frequently enough to remember the shortcut.
heywoodlh 3y ago
I use NixOS+GNOME+pop-shell for tiling windows on Linux, and I love it! I am quite frequently on MacOS, and I use Yabai[0] and skhd[1], managed with Nix-Darwin[2] for tiling windows and custom keyboard shortcuts. With how I make my Linux and MacOS builds look and feel identical it's pretty easy for me to forget when I'm on one vs the other. For anyone curious, here's my repository for deploying my configs[3]. It's awesome to have one source of truth for managing NixOS servers and workstations, MacOS workstations, and other Linux workstations with Nix installed. [0] https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai [1] https://github.com/koekeishiya/skhd https://github.com/koekeishiya/skhd [2] http://daiderd.com/nix-darwin/ http://daiderd.com/nix-darwin/ [3] https://github.com/heywoodlh/nixos-configs https://github.com/heywoodlh/nixos-configs
ptdorf 3y ago
I've been using https://www.hammerspoon.org/ https://www.hammerspoon.org/ for more than 5 years and it's perfect.
ogsuspect 3y ago
If you're okay with a non-open source app (App store purchase) -- "Magnet" is the way to go. Otherwise go with whats been suggested by others

richbell 3y ago

It's a sore-spot for sure. I've found that Rectangle[0] does a good enough job. [0] https://rectangleapp.com/ https://rectangleapp.com/

arthurcolle 3y ago
Magnet is also pretty good
AlchemistCamp 3y ago
I’m a very happy user of Rectangle, as well.
httpteapot 3y ago
Does Rectangle has a shortcut to switch the focused window in a split screen?
- wtvanhest 3y ago
  I’ve kind of solved this. You can snap windows but you need to add a shortcut in systems to do it. It’s not perfect, but it does work and overtime you miss it less and less
- walthamstow 3y ago
  No but Amethyst does https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- hirvi74 3y ago
  Hammerspoon can do it for I have it in my config. I also have it so I can switch to open windows on the same Space (I can throw windows into a tiled view and jump around to them). It's extremely flexible if you are willing to play around with it.
dcchambers 3y ago
Rectangle is so good - it's the first thing I recommend anyone new to MacOS download. I don't know why apple hasn't implemented this natively.
snowe2010 3y ago
Hammerspoon is by far the best option for devs, it’s more powerful than pretty much every solution out there, including better touch tool, and the only additional software I need is karabiner elements and alttab. Those three pieces of software will solve every single problem you have with Mac.

alin23 3y ago

You can mimic that in part with yabai (https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai). Disabling SIP gets you instant Space switching and creating without animation just like Pop_OS. But you can get very far to an automated tiling WM and keyboard navigation even without disabling SIP.

bartvk 3y ago
Just because this often comes up; I don't want to disable SIP. However I'm very happy with yabai.
- foxandmouse 3y ago
  I didn't realize it was possible to use it without disabling SIP, excited to give it another shot! AltTab with a few modifications is currently my preferred way to manage windows.
  - bartvk 3y ago
    To be honest I always wrote off Yabai until someone here commented that it works fine without disabling SIP. Only a small subset of features need that.

userbinator 3y ago

I suspect the constant emphasis on mouse use, ever since the first Macintosh, has created an attitude of "keyboard doesn't matter"; I've noticed that even early Windows is very usable with only a keyboard (the Alt, underlined letters, and arrow keys method is particularly well-designed), whereas e.g. classic MacOS is basically unusable without a mouse. In later versions they added keyboard access, but it still feels like it was done as a bare-minimum concession and not originally planned.

eitland 3y ago
My observation too. It is kind of evolution, just for computers. Macs early developed good pointing devices and as a result many keyboard related aspects can afford to be somewhere between weird and crazy. Bonus for Mac people insisting everything is fine. And I still consider getting a MacBook Pro next month, Windows PCs are that bad even with WSL :-/ Edit: at least these days, fn and ctrl can finally be remapped and CMD-tab can be fixed so it works consistently between two Firefox (or two Safari) windows, an IDE and Finder. It used to be that I would have to CMD-tab to the Firefox group, then CMD-| to get to the correct browser window and it was one of the things that truly messed up my workdays the last time I used Mac back in 2012. (No dedicated home/end buttons and every app seemingly being free to choose what shortcut they would use for it was probably the most painful one though.)
troyvit 3y ago
I had the opposite experience with MacOS. I hold every OS I've used since the early aughts up against MacOS 9 and they are all lacking in terms of keyboard navigation. Maybe it was because I had the previous 10 years to practice, but I felt I could do almost anything in pre-OSX MacOS with the keyboard, only relying on the mouse for application-specific stuff like photo editing. Navigating, filtering, opening files and folders were all incredibly easy. In KDE it's pretty much a joke every time I have to save-as. Can't even get through that filesystem menu without a mouse unless it supports <ctrl>-l. Dolphin is slightly better, especially if you enable the console pane to make it easier to switch to the command line, but it's still way behind Apple's finder from 1999.
- 3y ago

Trufa 3y ago

As a more general suggestion, macOS likely isn’t good at imitating what you previously had, try to understand the workflow they’re proposing, adapt and learn it, it generally gets second nature and pretty decent soon enough, getting to work the way you envision is not apple’s strong suit.

httpteapot 3y ago
Do you know some good ressources to learn how to use macOS the productive way, using mostly keyboard shortcuts instead of the trackpad?
- kashunstva 3y ago
  Apple maintains a list of macOS keyboard shortcuts that might be useful: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201236 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201236
- snowe2010 3y ago
  You can use hammerspoon to solve almost every issue you have.
nsonha 3y ago
Classic blame the user kind of argument, what is the alternative workflow to "snap windows with a hotkey" then?
- Tagbert 3y ago
  The point is that when switching OSs you are going to run into lots of places where the new OS does things differently that what you are used to. Your choice is to fight the new OS and try to keep doing things the way you are used to or embrace the new OS and learn some new workflows. That doesn’t mean adopting everything or abandoning everything, just try to be flexible and try some different things out. Just because it is different doesn’t mean it is broken. For window management there are dozens (at least) third party tools that add features like snap window. Try some out to see what you like. Rectangle, Magnet, Moom, BetterSnapTool come to mind but here are others.

dan-robertson 3y ago

I don’t really tile windows much. The main case where I do is with a bunch of terminal windows. Most of what I get out of a tiling window manager is full screen by default and easy keys to switch workspaces. On macOS the thing that drives me insane is that the many-finger swipe to switch desktops won’t focus the target window until the animation is totally done (like 0.7s after starting). I wish it works like cmd+tab which changes focus instantly. Apart from that I guess I’m not that bothered because I mostly just full screen things. Emacs and iterm2 can do their own tiling of windows.

kps 3y ago
I am not sure whether it applies to this case, but you might try turning on ‘Reduce motion’ under the Accessibility settings, which eliminates some animation delays.
- dan-robertson 3y ago
  Reduce motion changes the animation to fade-in fade-out but updating focus is still delayed
voltaireodactyl 3y ago
Just a heads up — you can solve that one annoyance; there are terminal commands that will reduce that animation to instantaneous.
- dan-robertson 3y ago
  I tried changing various defaults but lots of them seemed to no longer work. Maybe I only tried the options to increase the speed or I didn’t restart enough things or I spelled something wrong. I also tried looking at the binaries for relevant-looking names of defaults to change and didn’t find any (including the options that old internet advice recommended changing)
  - mthoms 3y ago
    The keyboard shortcuts to do this animate much quicker than the swipe does. In the past I've set up BetterTouchTool to press the corresponding key on left and right swipes. The only disadvantage is that there is no way to "peek" the previous desktop like you can with the built in swipes.

illiarian 3y ago

Divvy for window management (assign your own shortcut). For almost everything else there's a standardized system-wide shortcut (including the ancient ones like Ctrl+a/e for text). If there isn't a shortcut, but the app exposes the action in a menu, you can assign a custom shortcut from keyboard settings. MacOS has traditionally been very friendly to keyboard navigation. Well, until somewhat recently when mobile-only/mobile-first devs started just slapping Catalyst on and calling it a day. Even Apple's own apps suffer from this.

kitsunesoba 3y ago
> If there isn't a shortcut, but the app exposes the action in a menu, you can assign a custom shortcut from keyboard settings. The standardized menu system is underrated, IMO. Setting aside preferences for the menubar being global vs. being attached to app windows, the fact that it's system-owned makes features like this possible. Apple was able to implement custom keybinds for menu items in arbitrary apps because they know that 99.9% of apps use the system menubar. This would be next to impossible on Windows where menubar implementations are disparate and numerous (even within first party apps), and while something similar could be patched together on Linux, it'd only work on some (mostly Qt) apps since GTK has mostly abandoned menus altogether. This also enables the menu search in macOS Help menus to work, which is underused despite being basically a command palette for every app.
- koinedad 3y ago
  Menu bar search is underused for sure. One of my top commands after I learned about it.

jen729w 3y ago

I’ll just throw Magnet in the ring for a tiling solution. I have keyboard shortcuts well in muscle memory now for left/right third/half/two-thirds, and all four corners at a quarter of screen, and full screen. I find that meets 90% of my needs. Left/right two-thirds is my go-to when coding on 14”. VSCode on the left, Safari on the right. Both big enough to work well, but both leave enough of the other visible to be useful. Nice little app, costs some reasonable amount of money as a one-off purchase.

orf 3y ago
I use Magnet, but settings not syncing across devices is a bit annoying.
snowe2010 3y ago
Hammerspoon can handle that and much more, way more customizable and you can do amazing things like grid layouts. Completely open source, totally free, and the more people that use it the better it gets so I highly recommend it.

taspeotis 3y ago

Yeah I find some of the shortcuts confusing, like if I want to enter a directory in Finder I push ENTER and that's ... rename? Instead I'm meant to push PLACE OF INTEREST SIGN + O

lmz 3y ago
Cmd-down would also work.
eviks 3y ago
Oh yeah, that's a stupid keybind, made worse by the fact you can't reliably change it since you can't differentiate when you're in a text field But then you can mostly get by with a finder alternative

Tagbert 3y ago

You are probably better off ignoring Apples built in Window management controls unless you really like the way “Spaces” work. I find them too restrictive. Same with the green icon “full screen” mode. As others have mentioned, there are tones of third part tools that manage windows in various ways and you’ll probably find one that works for you.

rovr138 3y ago

As another suggestion, Better Touch Tool does great for tiling window manager and adding shortcuts. It's one of the first things I always need. It started coming from Linux with a similar experience to you. ---- A big shortcut for me is cmd+shift+/ It allows searching on all submenus. So when I'm working on an IDE for example, it's how I find those obscure options I know are there but I don't use frequently enough to remember the shortcut.

heywoodlh 3y ago

I use NixOS+GNOME+pop-shell for tiling windows on Linux, and I love it! I am quite frequently on MacOS, and I use Yabai[0] and skhd[1], managed with Nix-Darwin[2] for tiling windows and custom keyboard shortcuts. With how I make my Linux and MacOS builds look and feel identical it's pretty easy for me to forget when I'm on one vs the other. For anyone curious, here's my repository for deploying my configs[3]. It's awesome to have one source of truth for managing NixOS servers and workstations, MacOS workstations, and other Linux workstations with Nix installed. [0] https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai [1] https://github.com/koekeishiya/skhd https://github.com/koekeishiya/skhd [2] http://daiderd.com/nix-darwin/ http://daiderd.com/nix-darwin/ [3] https://github.com/heywoodlh/nixos-configs https://github.com/heywoodlh/nixos-configs

ptdorf 3y ago

I've been using https://www.hammerspoon.org/ https://www.hammerspoon.org/ for more than 5 years and it's perfect.

ogsuspect 3y ago

If you're okay with a non-open source app (App store purchase) -- "Magnet" is the way to go. Otherwise go with whats been suggested by others