Rift

Rift is a tiling window manager for macOS that focuses on performance and usability.

Features

• Multiple layout styles
  • Tiling (i3/sway-like)
  • Binary Space Partitioning (bspwm-like)
  • Master-stack (dwm-like)
  • Scrolling columns (niri-style)
    ^note

    when using multiple displays and the scrolling layout, displays must be arranged in a vertical stack or windows may leak into other displays due to displays all existing in the same coordinate space
  • Stack (accordion)
• Menubar icon that opens a menu for switching workspaces, changing layouts, and accessing quick Rift controls
  ^{click to see the menu bar icon}

  
• Save and restore layouts from the menu bar or CLI, with reusable layouts listed from a configurable folder
  ^{click to see the menu}

  
• MacOS-style mission control that allows you to visually navigate between workspaces
  ^{click to see mission control}

  
• Focus follows the mouse with auto raise
• Drag windows over one another to swap positions
• Performant animations ^{(as seen in the demo)}
• Switch to next/previous workspace with trackpad gestures ^{(just like native macOS)}
• Hot reloadable configuration
• Interop with third-party programs (ie Sketchybar)
  • Requests can be made to rift via the cli or the mach port exposed (lua client here)
  • Signals can be sent on startup, workspace switches, and when the windows within a workspace change. These signals can be sent via a command(cli) or through a mach connection
• Does not require disabling SIP
• Works with “Displays have separate Spaces” enabled (unlike all other major WMs)

Quick Start

Get up and running via the wiki:

config

quick start

Status

Rift is in active development but is still generally stable. There is no official release yet; expect ongoing changes.

Issues and PRs are very welcome.

Community

Join the Rift community on Matrix for discussion, support, and announcements: #rift:matrix.org

Motivation

Aerospace worked well for me, but I missed animations and the ability to use fullscreen on one display while working on the other. I also prefer leveraging private/undocumented APIs as they tend to be more reliable (due to the OS being built on them and all the public APIs) and performant. ^{for more on why rift exists and what rift strives to do, see the manifesto}

Credits

Rift began as a fork (and is licensed as such) of glide-wm but has since diverged significantly. It uses private APIs reverse engineered by yabai and other projects. It is not affiliated with glide-wm or yabai.