A tiling window manager for Windows 10 based on binary space partitioning

Jade

Last update: Nov 12, 2022

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Overview

yatta

BSP Tiling Window Manager for Windows 10

Getting Started

This project is still heavily under development and there are no prebuilt binaries available yet.

If you would like to use yatta, you will need a working Rust development environment on Windows 10. If you are using the x86_64-pc-windows-msvc toolchain, make sure you have also installed the Build Tools for Visual Studio 2019.

You can then clone this repo and compile the source code to install the binaries for yatta and yattac:

cargo install --path yatta
cargo install --path yattac

By running yattac start at a Powershell prompt, you should see the following output:

Start-Process yatta -WindowStyle hidden

This means that yatta is now running in the background, tiling all your windows, and listening for commands sent to it by yattac.

You can similarly stop the process by running yattac stop, and you should see the following output:

Stop-Process -Name yatta

Keybindings

This project does not handle anything related to keybindings and keyboard shortcuts. I am currently using AutoHotKey to manage my window management keyboard shortcuts. Here is a sample yatta.ahk AHK script that you can use as a starting point for your own:

; Start yatta, this command makes sure no duplicate processes will be created
Run, yattac.exe start, Hide

; Send the configuration options for yatta here
;
; Ensure there are 3 virtual desktops
Run, yattac.exe ensure-desktops 3, Hide

; Always open Signal in Desktop 2
Run, yattac.exe exe-desktop Signal.exe 2, Hide
; Always open Ferdi in Desktop 2
Run, yattac.exe exe-desktop Ferdi.exe 2, Hide

; Always float IntelliJ popups, matching on class
Run, yattac.exe float-class SunAwtDialog, Hide
; Always float Control Panel, matching on class
Run, yattac.exe float-class CabinetWClass, Hide
; Always float Task Manager, matching on class
Run, yattac.exe float-class TaskManagerWindow, Hide
; Always float Wally, matching on executable name
Run, yattac.exe float-exe Wally.exe, Hide
; Always float Calculator app, matching on window title
Run, yattac.exe float-title Calculator, Hide

; Change the focused window, Alt + Vim direction keys
!h::
; This sends an Alt key which is a hack to steal focus when Windows doesn't feel like respecting SetForegroundWindow
; https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10740346/setforegroundwindow-only-working-while-visual-studio-is-open
Send !
Run, yattac.exe focus left, , Hide
return

!j::
Send !
Run, yattac.exe focus down, , Hide
return

!k::
Send !
Run, yattac.exe focus up, , Hide
return

!l::
Send !
Run, yattac.exe focus right, , Hide
return

; Move the focused window in a given direction, Alt + Shift + Vim direction keys
!+h::
Run, yattac.exe move left, Hide
return

!+j::
Run, yattac.exe move down, Hide
return

!+k::
Run, yattac.exe move up, Hide
return

!+l::
Run, yattac.exe move right, Hide
return

; Promote the focused window to the top of the tree, Alt + Shift + Enter
!+Enter::
Run, yattac.exe promote, Hide
return

; Switch to an equal-width, max-height column layout, Alt + Shift + C
!+c::
Run, yattac.exe layout columns, Hide
return

; Switch to the default vertical bsp tiling layout, Alt + Shift + T
!+t::
Run, yattac.exe layout bspv, Hide
return

; Force a retile if things get janky, Alt + Shift + R
!+r::
Run, yattac.exe retile, Hide
return

; Float the focused window, Alt + Shift + F
!+f::
Run, yattac.exe toggle-float, Hide
return

; Pause responding to any window events or yattac commands, Alt + P
!p::
Run, yattac.exe toggle-pause, Hide
return

As more commands are still being added and some commands and arguments may change before the CLI is stabilised, I recommend running yattac.exe help to see the full list of commands and operations available to be bound to keyboard shortcuts.

Comments

Workspaces
This pull request adds workspaces. It is not quite ready for merge yet, but functionality-wise it works just fine.

There are infinite workspaces that are indexed by numbers starting from 0. They are created automatically when you move to them or move a window to them. To open a workspace, I added the yattac set-workspace command and to move the currently focused window to a specified workspace I added yattac move-window-to-workspace.

Windows not on the current workspace are completely hidden (they don't appear in Alt+Tab or the taskbar).

The behavior with multiple monitors is that each monitor has its own set of workspaces and each monitor's workspace can be switched separately.

Also, this implentation of workspaces does not have support for workspaces as tags (having a window on multiple workspaces / having multiple workspaces open at the same time), but as far as I know bspwm does not have this functionality either and in my opinion implementing this would just be unnecessarily complicated for a feature that few people actually use.

There are still a few issues that need to be fixed before merge:

[ ] Minimized windows appear on all workspaces

[ ] There is no way to specify a default workspace for a window

[ ] Weird behavior when switching windows virtual desktops

[ ] When a window shows itself the workspace should automatically be switched to the one where the window is on (for example, if you click on a Firefox link, the Firefox window appears and then disappears immediately again, instead the workspace should be switched to the one Firefox is on)

[x] If a window closes itself while not on the current workspace, resize adjustments may not be carried over (I could not find any way to produce this hypothetical bug so it probably doesn't exist)

[x] Messy code

[x] Restore focus on workspace switch

[x] Add example hotkeys

[x] When Yatta is closed with open windows on other workspaces, they become permanently irretrievable and can only be closed via Task Manager

[x] Some programs (Firefox, IntelliJ on startup) may appear on multiple workspaces at once or just switch workspaces themselves

[x] Minimizing windows leads to very weird behavior, such as making a different window appear on multiple workspaces at once

Fixes #14
opened by ghost 35
Resizing windows with yattac

Oh and also, is there supposed to be a way to resize windows? Or at least make it so manually resizing windows makes yatta aware of the new size? (Feel free to tell me to open another issue because i guess I'm getting off-topic 😁 )

Originally posted by @eramdam in https://github.com/LGUG2Z/yatta/issues/2#issuecomment-803249946

opened by LGUG2Z 7
Feature request: Multi-monitor support

What the title says 😅

If it's already there, I couldn't find any command to handle that. Very promising project already, as a fan of yabai on macOS I'm very happy to see a (good) equivalent shaping up on Windows 🙇‍♂️ 🙏

opened by eramdam 7
Resizing windows with a mouse

Will try to do that later this week! Would it be possible to make it so mouse-resizing updates the tree as well? (Just curious if that's even possible)

Originally posted by @eramdam in https://github.com/LGUG2Z/yatta/issues/3#issuecomment-807343951

opened by LGUG2Z 4
Add a license

Because this project has no license, forking and modifying it or using the source code even for just a pull request is illegal. I already made a pull request before noticing this which technically violates your copyright, so if you want me to I can delete my fork and pull request.

opened by ghost 3
Steam, when closed, still takes up space in the layout

When you open Steam, and close the window, it still takes up space in the layout and becomes a "phantom window" that only disappears if you close the entire Steam process from tray (which also stops all Steam games and is thus undesirable).

opened by ghost 2
Feature request: Workspaces

I currently switch to arch + bspwm and happy with the way bspwm manages workspace. With windows desktop, there always lag/unstable and slow animation when switching desktop. Is there any plan for yatta to support a virtual workspace?

opened by xquangdang 2
Building Error

Is it possible to compile this on WSL? I'm using ubuntu 18.04 and followed the rust setup instructions for WSL. After setting up it gives me this toolchain: stable-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.

I'm getting an error when trying to run cargo install --path yatta, here is the verbose message:

I have never touched rust before, so I'm not sure if I'm missing a different toolchain or something.

opened by kai-dg 2
Feature request: Tabbing

Feature: Window tabs

How it's supposed to behave: Window tabs allows stacks of windows, similar to how a browser tab works, the active tab(window) is the topmost and visible one. That would allow for awesome workflow and less cramped windows.

Here's stackline from yabai, as reference.

opened by nodgear 2
refactor(windows-rs): upgrade to 0.9.1 and handle all breaking changes

This was probably the least fun upgrade I've ever done of a dependency. Many imports moved packages, contants were changed to associated constants, and the linker refused to work with wildcards in the build.rs file of the bindings package.

This commit is the result of patiently going through each error reported by rustc, cross referencing with the new windows-rs docs and updating / making things more semantic where it seemed like the right thing to do.

I am running this commit locally for a few days to see if any regressions have been introduced, but it seems like everything is alright at first glance.

opened by LGUG2Z 1
Swap windows with mouse

Since the mouse resize WinEvent is shared with mouse moving, I may as well implement a handler for moves where the window that a dragged window is placed over is treated as a swap target.

opened by LGUG2Z 1

Owner

Jade

Carly Rae Jepsen fanboy @BeameryHQ

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