

i3 is not available for Mac but there are some alternatives that runs on macOS with similar functionality. The best Mac alternative is Kera Desktop, which is both free and Open Source. If that doesn't suit you, our users have ranked more than 50 alternatives to i3 and nine of them are available for Mac so hopefully you can find a suitable replacement. Other interesting Mac alternatives to i3 are Xmonad, Amethyst, yabai and spectrwm.


xmonad is a dynamically tiling X11 window manager that is written and configured in Haskell. In a normal WM, you spend half your time aligning and searching for windows. xmonad makes work easier, by automating this.




Amethyst is a tiling window manager for Mac similar to the xmonad tiling window manager popular on Linux. Amethyst is written in Objective-C and has configurable shortcuts, multi-monitor support, multiple layouts, and the option to float certain applications.


yabai started as a C99 rewrite of chunkwm, originally supposed to be its first RC version.

spectrwm is a small dynamic tiling window manager for X11. It tries to stay out of the way so that valuable screen real estate can be used for much more important stuff. It has sane defaults and does not require one to learn a language to do any configuration.




Phoenix is a lightweight OS X window and app manager scriptable with JavaScript. You can also easily use languages which compile to JavaScript such as CoffeeScript. Phoenix aims for efficiency and a very small footprint.






