Glide

Glide is a tiling window manager for macOS. It takes inspiration from window managers like i3, Sway, and Hyprland.

glide_demo.mov

Integrates with Spaces: Adopt incrementally, using Mission Control and moving between spaces as you normally would.

Keyboard focused; trackpad enhanced: Bring the responsiveness of tiling window managers to macOS. Resize interactively. Speed up trackpad use with mouse-follows-focus and focus-follows-mouse.

Adapts to your environment: Customize your layout as you move between external monitor and on the go.

Reliable architecture: Made with years of experience building window managers for macOS.

Supports animations, too!

Quick start

Download the latest release from the releases page.

Open the disk image and install Glide by dragging it into Applications. I recommend installing the glide CLI; you can do this by running in a terminal:

sudo ln -s /Applications/Glide.app/Contents/MacOS/glide /usr/local/bin

Launch the app. The first time you do this, you will have to follow instructions to enable Accessibility permissions.

Once Glide is running, press Alt+Z to start managing the current space. Note: This will resize all your windows! To stop managing the space, press Alt+Z again.

See glide.default.toml for a list of key bindings. You can customize these by editing ~/.glide.toml and either restarting Glide or running the following:

glide config update

Tip

To apply changes as you save, add the --watch flag: glide config update --watch.

To exit Glide, type Alt+Shift+E.

Building from source

First, install Rust and make sure you have the latest Xcode command line tools installed.

Then, run the following:

git clone https://github.com/glide-wm/glide
cd glide
cargo run --release

The first time you do this, you may have to follow instructions to enable Accessibility permissions. Instead of enabling them for Glide, enable them for whatever application your terminal is running in.

Save and restore

If you need to update Glide or restart it for any reason, exit with the save_and_exit key binding (default Alt+Shift+E). Then, when starting again, run it with the --restore flag:

cargo run --release -- --restore

Note that this does not work across machine restarts. Currently it only works when running Glide from the command line.

Acknowledgements

Glide builds on the work of many who came before. Yabai contains a wealth of information about the tricks and techniques needed to write window managers on macOS. objc2 and related crates make it possible for Glide to be written in Rust. tracing provides tree-structured logging to follow the complex asynchronous flows that are inherently required in a macOS window manager like Glide.

Contributing

New contributions are welcome, whether they are filing an issue, improving docs, or writing code. See CONTRIBUTING.md to get started.

License and usage notes

Licensed under either of Apache License, Version 2.0 or MIT license at your option.