paneru

About

Paneru is a MacOS window manager that arranges windows on an infinite strip, extending to the right. A core principle is that opening a new window will never cause existing windows to resize, maintaining your layout stability.

Each monitor operates with its own independent window strip, ensuring that windows remain confined to their respective displays and do not "overflow" onto adjacent monitors.

Why Paneru?

• Niri-like Behavior on MacOS: Inspired by the user experience of [Niri], Paneru aims to bring a similar scrollable tiling workflow to MacOS.
• Works with MacOS workspaces: You can use existing workspaces and switch between them with keyboard or touchpad gestures - with a separate window strip on each. Drag and dropping windows between them works as well.
• Focus follows mouse on MacOS: Very useful for people who would like to avoid an extra click.
• Sliding windows with touchpad: Using a touchpad is quite natural for navigation of the window pane.
• Optimal for Large Displays: Standard tiling window managers can be suboptimal for large displays, often resulting in either huge maximized windows or numerous tiny, unusable windows. Paneru addresses this by providing a more flexible and practical arrangement.
• Improved Small Display Usability: On smaller displays (like laptops), traditional tiling can make windows too small to be productive, forcing users to constantly maximize. Paneru's sliding strip approach aims to provide a better experience without this compromise.

Inspiration

The fundamental architecture and window management techniques are heavily inspired by [Yabai], another excellent MacOS window manager. Studying its source code has provided invaluable insights into managing windows on MacOS, particularly regarding undocumented functions.

The innovative concept of managing windows on a sliding strip is directly inspired by [Niri] and [PaperWM.spoon].