Simulating a 3 Way Tile View

[bustedbyte]

Hi about once a year I come back to tile managers to see if it's possible to run apps in fullscreen while tiling. I have an apple M1 and it can only support one external monitor, so I have a massive 49" ultrawide which is great. But I'd love to have something like the native macos split, except not just in two sections but perhaps 3 or 4 so I could have less context switching. Right now there is so much wasted space and so many screen flips.

When running out of full screen modes various IDE's and browsers add a bunch of extra visual overhead thats hard to hide. Hoping against hope 🤞 Thanks!

[ldangelo]

@bustedbyte did you ever figure this out?? I've been looking for something similar. With yabai the closest I can come is to set the layout to float and create hotkeys to send windows to the left, middle and right thirds... It works fine but isn't automatic...

[diocletiann]

This works for me. It assumes the first two windows had a vertical split, you can always check for that and toggle their split as well.

yabai -m signal --add event=window_created action='/Users/xxx/.config/yabai/3-columns.sh $YABAI_WINDOW_ID'

#!/usr/bin/env dash

if yabai -m query --windows --space | jq -e 'map(select(."is-visible") | .app) | length == 3' &&
  yabai -m query --windows --window $1 | jq -e '."split-type" == "horizontal"'
then
  yabai -m window $1 --toggle split && yabai -m space --balance
else
  yabai -m space --balance
fi

[stefanopagliari]

@restfuladi. thank you for this. It works very well.
Is there a way to tinker with that so that:

1. if there are already 3 vertical tiles on the monitor, the 4th one is created by splitting the one on the right?
   or
2. if there are already 3 vertical tiles on the monitor, the 4th one (and any after) is stacked on top of the one on the right?

[diocletiann]

I've been working on a Go wrapper so I decided to add this feature. Here's a really basic prototype of v1, I'm new to this and there may be lousy code. I use auto-balance so I didn't add those commands here, I may do that later. Added balance command for <= 3 columns.

package main

import (
    "encoding/json"
    "io"
    "net"
    "os"
    "os/user"
    "strconv"
    "strings"
)

type window struct {
    ID        int    `json:"id"`
    IsVisible bool   `json:"is-visible"`
    SplitType string `json:"split-type"`
}

type space struct {
    LastWindow int `json:"last-window"`
}

func main() {
    newId := os.Args[1]
    newIdInt, _ := strconv.Atoi(newId)

    u, _ := user.Current()
    addr := "/tmp/yabai_" + u.Username + ".socket"

    var w []window
    c, _ := net.Dial("unix", addr)
    c.Write([]byte("query\x00--windows\x00--space\x00\x00"))
    r, _ := io.ReadAll(c)
    json.Unmarshal(r, &w)

    var n int
    for _, v := range w {
        if v.IsVisible {
            n++
        }
    }
    if n <= 3 {
        for _, v := range w {
            if v.ID == newIdInt && v.SplitType == "horizontal" {
                s := strings.Join([]string{"window", newId, "--toggle", "split", "\x00"}, "\x00")
                c, _ = net.Dial("unix", addr)
                c.Write([]byte(s))

                s := strings.Join([]string{"space", newId, "--balance", "\x00"}, "\x00")
		c, _ = net.Dial("unix", addr)
		_, _ = c.Write([]byte(s))
                return
            } else {
		s := strings.Join([]string{"space", newId, "--balance", "\x00"}, "\x00")
		c, _ = net.Dial("unix", addr)
		_, _ = c.Write([]byte(s))
                return
	    }
        }
    }
    if n > 3 {
        var sp space
        c, _ = net.Dial("unix", addr)
        c.Write([]byte("query\x00--spaces\x00--space\x00\x00"))
        r, _ = io.ReadAll(c)
        json.Unmarshal(r, &sp)
        lw := strconv.Itoa(sp.LastWindow)

        c, _ = net.Dial("unix", addr)
        s := strings.Join([]string{"window", lw, "--insert", "south", "\x00"}, "\x00")
        c.Write([]byte(s))

        c, _ = net.Dial("unix", addr)
        s = strings.Join([]string{"window", newId, "--warp", lw, "\x00"}, "\x00")
        c.Write([]byte(s))
    }
}