t3h l337 t3ch z0n3: Aerospace
2025-04-01
the first of what will probably be a series of posts where i talk about the nerd shit i do on my computer to make me more productive (or just feel like a cool hacker)
before touch screens came along, the computer mouse was the great equalizer. no need for complicated keyboard commands or shortcuts, just point and click. but while the mouse empowered me in so many ways (like allowing me to make video games without typing out code), it also made me complacent. lazy.
as a youth, i would occasionally compose my messages not with keys, but by mouse - methodically copying and pasting individual letters from existing on-screen text. it was not efficient, but it did allow me to stay comfortably reclined in my chair.
these days tho, i’m all about efficiency. the keyboard is my ally, not my enemy. i need every last one of those keys helping me carry the burden of productivity.
Aerospace is an “i3-like tiling window manager for macOS”. some of those words mean something to me, but i had to look up “i3” in particular - the tl;dr is that it allows you to organize and navigate your various application windows entirely via keyboard shortcuts. there was a little bit of a learning curve, but now that i have it set up, i'm not sure i can live without it.
if you’re familiar with the concept of “multiple desktops” in macOS, Aerospace acts as a faster alternative that lacks the fancy transition animations. you can switch between workspaces (desktops) by pressing windows can be snapped in a 50/50 split (which macOS can also do natively), but also tiled in any number of arbitrary ways.
tbh i sparingly make use of the “tiling” part[1], but instead have each of my open apps dedicated to their own full-screen workspace. you can manually shuffle windows around to different workspaces, but you can also configure them to be automatically sent to a specific workspace on open. for example, Alt+O takes me to Obsidian[2] and Alt+V is VSCodium. you can also force workspaces to open on specific monitors, so when my MacBook is docked at my desk, i have Alt+A/B/C set to my second monitor, Alt+X/Y/Z on my third monitor, and Alt+1/2/3 dedicated to the built-in display. Alt+Tab will bounce your focus back to the last window/workspace you interacted with, optionally sending your mouse cursor along with it[3]
there’s definitely more cool stuff you can make it do - all of these shortcut are customizable via a single config file and the documentation is pretty good. it's still in beta, however, so expect a little jankiness[4]
if you aren’t a Mac user but find yourself intrigued by this window manager stuff, you have options! Linux is home to the original i3, which has a number of forks that add their own spin. i personally tried Sway and Regolith. the most polished one i found on Windows was Glaze.
it seems pretty common for these to include some kind of quick app launcher as well, which Aerospace does not, but i’ve been happily using Alfred for a long time[5] before i even had any idea these things existed. i did set the recommended Alt+Enter shortcut to open my Terminal though, that one can be pretty useful
my rightmost office monitor always has Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Outlook open side-by-side. they both have the ability to display my calendar, which is obnoxious. both apps somehow manage to do Too Much and Not Enough all at once ↩︎
i’m writing this post in Obsidian! the dream for Bimbo would be to make an Obsidian plugin that allows you to build and publish new blog posts directly from the app... ↩︎
a weird quirk of Aerospace is that it doesn't minimize your "off-screen" windows, it literally positions them off-screen - or as off-screen as is possible in macOS. it's recommended that you offset the virtual arrangement of your monitors to create more dead space for windows to hide, otherwise you'll see them edge into view sometimes. as a result of the offsetting, my mouse cursor no longer glides neatly between monitors, so having it snap to the middle whenever i change workspaces is very helpful ↩︎
i've mostly had a good experience over the few months i've been using it, but i recently switched to using Orion Browser and there's something about it that doesn't play nice with Aerospace. there are other folks on the GitHub posting about these issues, so hopefully i can find a fix at some point. ↩︎
i have not spent much time making my own custom workflows for Alfred, but there are some nice premade things out there. someone even made one for use with Aerospace specifically ↩︎