dinky GITHUB ↗

dinky's icon: a sketched face, laughing

Tiling on native Spaces, SIP left on.

oh wow. you moved a rectangle.

$ dinky workspace 3
$ dinky list-windows --workspace 3
4211 | Ghostty | ~
4388 | Safari  | dinky
$ dinky layout accordion █

Latest release: 0.28

dinky tiles the windows on each native Space and switches Spaces in about 70 ms instead of half a second. It has an accordion mode, a scrolling layout after niri and Hyprland, a master layout after Hyprland’s, focus borders, a TOML config and a dinky command line for scripts and bars. Nothing is injected into the Dock.

It is not a compositor: macOS still draws every window. Windows glide to their tiles by being moved there, frame by frame, and a column scrolled out of view hangs off the display edge, since nothing can clip it.

Status: early, in daily use by its author on macOS 27. Expect rough edges.

Private APIs. macOS has no public way to switch Spaces quickly or move a window between them, so dinky uses a synthetic Dock swipe and a few private SkyLight calls. A macOS update can break them.

Requirements

Install

brew install --cask mikker/tap/dinky
open -a dinky

Or download the app and drag it to Applications, then put the command line on your PATH:

ln -s /Applications/dinky.app/Contents/MacOS/dinky /usr/local/bin/dinky

dinky lives in the menu bar and updates itself.

From source

Needs Swift 6 and just.

git clone https://github.com/mikker/Dinky.git && cd Dinky
IDENTITY="Apple Development: Your Name (TEAMID)" just install
open build/dinky.app

just install builds and signs build/dinky.app and links the CLI into ~/.local/bin. Sign with a stable identity (security find-identity -p codesigning): macOS ties the Accessibility grant to the signature, so ad-hoc builds lose it on every rebuild.

First run

dinky writes ~/.config/dinky/dinky.toml, asks for Accessibility, and offers once to turn off “When switching to an application, switch to a Space with open windows” (Desktop & Dock > Mission Control). With that off, Cmd-Tab and Dock clicks switch Spaces the fast way instead of sliding while dinky is running and enabled. Saying no is fine. This is a persistent macOS preference: quitting or disabling dinky does not turn it back on. If activating an app with Quicksilver, Cmd-Tab or the Dock shows only its menu bar instead of switching to its Space, turn the setting back on in System Settings > Desktop & Dock > Mission Control.

The menu bar shows the current workspace. Its menu has the everyday commands (workspaces, focus, move, join, resize, layout, displays and modes), each with the key bound to it in the current mode, and lists the bindings it doesn’t cover under Other Key Bindings. dinky doctor checks the config and the macOS settings dinky depends on.

Turn off “Automatically rearrange Spaces based on most recent use” in the same place, or workspace numbers move around; dinky doctor warns while it’s on.

Run one tiling window manager at a time. With AeroSpace, Amethyst, yabai or KiwiDesk also running, each undoes the other’s layouts; dinky shows a ! in the menu bar and says which one to quit.

Magnet and Rectangle

To snap a window with Magnet or Rectangle, first float it with dinky layout floating, or disable dinky with dinky enable off before snapping. dinky keeps tiled windows in their layout, including after another app moves or resizes them; a snapping command does not automatically float a window. Snapping tools are not included in the warning about other tiling window managers. Use dinky layout tiling to tile the window again, or dinky enable on to resume tiling after disabling dinky. For a workspace-filling window managed by dinky, use dinky fullscreen instead.

Uninstall

Quit dinky, delete the app, ~/.config/dinky, ~/Library/Application Support/dinky and ~/Library/Logs/dinky.log, run defaults delete com.brnbw.dinky, and remove it from Accessibility and Login Items. To get the Cmd-Tab slide back:

defaults write com.apple.dock workspaces-auto-swoosh -bool true && killall Dock

Known limits

Credits

MIT licensed.