Dynamic tiling manager with Hammerspoon

[AlgusDark]

I'm wondering if I could ditch tiling managers like Amethyst/Yabai with Hammerspoon. Something I would like to have is the Dynamic tiling when a new window enters/leaves. I'm not sure if there is a watcher for that. Should I use hs.window.filter.new(true) and have a global filter and then check all the visible windows?

The idea of my tiling manager would be:

• Arrange entering/leaving windows as:
  • Full -- half/half -- half/2-horizontal-split -- 1/4 grid
• Be able to jump from focused window to any other window through cardinal points
• Be able to swap focused window to any cardinal point
• Be able to create/destroy spaces and move windows through spaces (I believe this is experimental in Hammerspoon... just moving windows to spaces left or right is ok)
• Open a Space-Domain (something like opening 4 different apps in the current space or a new one)

From the list above, those that aren't ticked are those that I don't know if it's possible to do with hammerspoon 🤔 If is possible, or if there is a spoon for my needs, could anyone share some tips for achieving this?

Thanks!

[MuhammedZakir]

See hs.spaces[1]. You will definitely have visual-flicker when using this. If you're satisfied with it, fine, otherwise a better approach is to use Yabai, but control it using Hammerspoon - use key mapping modules instead of skhd and communicate directly using hs.socket[2] rather than by executing yabai.

[1] http://www.hammerspoon.org/docs/hs.spaces.html
[2] http://www.hammerspoon.org/docs/hs.socket.html

[AlgusDark]

I'm a little confused on how to use hs.socket for yabai. Let's say that we have this yabai -m window --focus west and I want to bind it to alt+cmd+h. How I could do that?

[MuhammedZakir]

1. For binding to a keyboard/mouse shortuct, you can use hs.hotkey(easy), hs.hotkey.modal(easy), or hs.eventtap(more work, but is more configurable/customizable).

2. Translating yabai -m <message>: using your example, yabai -m window --focus west, the message to send will be window\0--focus\0west\0.

   • You can construct this manually, or use string.gsub (if you don't use space other than as a seperator), or use a table and join them using table.concat. See below example (below is just a demonstration, for the last two, you should extract that to a function instead):

   • -- constructing manually
     local message = "window\0--focus\0west\0"
     -- using `string.gsub`
     local message = ("window --focus west "):gsub(" +", "\0")
     -- using `table.concat`
     local message = table.concat({"'window", "--focus", "west"}, "\0") .. "\0"

3. Because of the way Yabai currently handles socket connection, you will have close the connection each time you write the message and read the response, that means that you will have connect to the socket again before writing message.

4. Be sure to check the first char of the response. \07 as first char means a failure.

Edit: I didn't post code because I haven't used hs.socket before.

Edit-2: Forgot to mention: you will also need to parse successful responses, which will be in JSON. I haven't checked how to do this; you can search for a Lua JSON parser, or you can use LPeg - which will probably enough especially if you only want to cherry-pick some details from the response.

Edit-3: There's already a HS module that provides JSON to Lua-table decoder -- http://www.hammerspoon.org/docs/hs.json.html.

---

Here is an example which uses Go: koekeishiya/yabai#1312 (comment). Note that, it uses \x00 rather than \0. Both are same. if you would like to use that, then for \07, it would be \x07 (this is what Yabai uses).

[MuhammedZakir]

Converting yabai -m <commands>: client_send_message function in yabai.c: https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai/blob/32ce2f9590151b37c288cfe5559375bd0e1522e6/src/yabai.c#L46

All possible errors: search for daemon_fail in message.c: https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai/blob/master/src/message.c

[AlgusDark]

Thanks, I'll try this on the weekend :D

[brandonkboswell]

Did any of you try invoking Yabai via socket? Was it significantly different than os.execute?

[AlgusDark]

Sorry, I'm now just using yabai but I do use hammerspoon for some tricks.
I showed in this presentation: https://youtu.be/UchF6s2j5r8?t=2269

[brandonkboswell]

Thank you sharing Carlos!

…

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[Bellavene]

https://github.com/mogenson/PaperWM.spoon