ChainYourMac vs yabai: two philosophies of Mac tiling

What yabai is

yabai is a free, open-source tiling window manager driven entirely from the command line. It arranges windows in binary-space-partition layouts — each new window splits an existing region in half — with stack and float modes available too. Configuration is a yabairc script full of CLI commands, hotkeys usually come from the companion tool skhd, and its query interface lets you script practically anything about your window state.

It's a genuinely impressive project, and for terminal-native users it's the deepest tiling toolkit on macOS. That depth has a price: there's no GUI at all, the learning curve is steep, and macOS updates have historically required maintenance to keep everything working.

Then there's the SIP question. yabai's core tiling works on a stock Mac, but its advanced features — moving windows between Spaces instantly, creating and destroying Spaces, certain visual tricks — require partially disabling System Integrity Protection so yabai can inject a scripting addition into Dock.app. Plenty of people do it happily; plenty of people are not willing to relax a security boundary for window management.

What ChainYourMac is

ChainYourMac is a native macOS app (SwiftUI interface, Rust engine) built around a different model: the endless horizontal strip. Windows sit side by side at whatever size you give them; new windows slot in at the edge; you navigate by scrolling — trackpad swipes with momentum, or vim-style shortcuts. Nothing ever reflows.

Everything is configured from a GUI with live reload — width presets, focus-follows-mouse, gestures, and shortcut recording. It works with native macOS Spaces (each Space keeps its own strip), runs an independent strip per display, and requires only the standard Accessibility permission. No SIP changes at any feature level, no config files, no companion tools.

The real difference: what happens when a window opens

This is the heart of it. In a BSP layout, screen space is a fixed pie: every new window takes a slice from an existing one, so your editor gets narrower as your day gets busier. That's not a yabai flaw — it's the BSP contract, and many people like the everything-always-visible discipline of it.

The strip makes the opposite trade. Your editor stays at the width you chose forever; new windows extend the strip past the screen edge instead of carving up what's visible. You see fewer windows at once and scroll between them — calm layouts, at the cost of the at-a-glance grid. Which contract you prefer is the whole decision.

Day-to-day feel

The workflows differ as much as the layouts. Tuning yabai means editing yabairc, reloading, checking behavior, editing skhd for the matching hotkey, reloading again — a loop that terminal users find comfortable and everyone else finds like homework. Window movement is instant but unanimated, and macOS updates have a history of breaking things until a patch lands, which is part of the deal with any tool that reaches as deep as yabai does.

ChainYourMac's loop is: open the settings window, click the thing, watch it apply live. Rebinding a shortcut is click the field and press the keys. Windows glide between positions with 120 fps spring animations instead of teleporting, and the engine ships as a signed native app that updates like any other Mac software. Neither approach is wrong — they're just built for different owners.

ChainYourMac vs yabai, side by side

Which one should you pick?

Choose yabai if…

• you live in the terminal and want to script every aspect of your window state;
• BSP grids are exactly the layout discipline you're after;
• free and open source matters more to you than convenience, and you're comfortable with the SIP trade-off for the full feature set.

Choose ChainYourMac if…

• the thing you dislike about tiling is the reflow — you want windows to keep the sizes you set;
• you won't disable SIP, full stop;
• you want trackpad gestures, animations, and a settings GUI instead of a yabairc file;
• you'd rather spend an afternoon working than configuring.

No hard feelings either way — yabai is superb at being yabai. The question is whether you want a grid you can program or a strip that stays out of your way.

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