Changelog

0.21

Upgrading: layout scrolling, layout master and layout dwindle no longer parse, so a config binding them fails to load. Write workspace-layout scrolling, master or dwindle instead, and split a cycle like layout tiles accordion scrolling into layout tiles accordion and workspace-layout dwindle scrolling.

Commands

• layout only sets the focused window’s container, the stack in a master layout and the column in a scrolling one, or floats and tiles the window, as in AeroSpace. The new workspace-layout <dwindle|master|scrolling>... switches the workspace’s layout and cycles the same way. The Layout menu follows.
• workspace-layout dwindle from a master workspace keeps the stack’s mode instead of taking the config’s.
• New %{workspace-layout} format variable: dwindle, fixed, master or scrolling.

0.20

Tiling

• New master layout, after Hyprland’s: one window, the master, takes [master] size of the display (0.6) on the [master] side you choose, and the others stack beside it. The first window fills the display alone, the second opens the stack, later ones join its bottom. When the master closes, the top of the stack takes its place; when the stack empties, the master fills the display again. layout tiles accordion toggles the stack between tiles and an accordion from any window in it.
• layout master switches the focused workspace to the master layout with the focused window as the master, and layout dwindle takes a master or scrolling workspace back to its tree. swap-with-master swaps the focused window with the master, or the master with the top of the stack. All three are in the Layout menu.

Configuration

• follow-app-activation also takes a table, [follow-app-activation] with enabled and exclude-apps, a list of bundle IDs whose activation dinky never follows to another Space. Use it for a menu bar app whose popover counts as a window, such as Synology Drive Client, which otherwise pulls you to its workspace when you click its icon (#27).

Fixes

• A browser’s picture-in-picture window no longer takes dinky’s focus, so focus left and friends work with the video playing: focus stays with the tiled window beneath (#13). Before, Chromium browsers kept it above every other window and tagged it like a document window, so dinky took it for the focused one and focus answered “no focused window” until it was closed.
• An app that stops responding no longer stalls dinky. Before, a hung frontmost app could stall typing everywhere, since dinky asked it for its focused window twice a second with no time limit; raising its windows blocked the next arrangement, disabling and quitting for seconds; reading a new window’s fullscreen button could take six; and an arrangement that waited on it could put an older stacking order back over the latest one. Every question dinky asks an app now gives up within a second, and overlapping windows end up in the order of the latest arrangement.
• Disabled dinky leaves windows and Spaces alone. Before, while off it still ran [[rules]] on new windows, moved them to the focused display, and rearranged workspaces on a config reload or display change; a dinky enable off sent before Accessibility was granted got lost; and turning dinky back on after a display was plugged in or out while it was off sent windows back to where they were before the change.
• Disabling, quitting and dinky recover put windows back where they were when dinky launched. Before, the frames recorded as the originals could already be the tiled ones. A window that could not be put back, because its display was unplugged or its app did not answer, is tried again by the next disable, quit or dinky recover, unless you move it by hand first; one app that stops responding during the restore no longer spoils the report for the others; and dinky started disabled leaves windows alone when it quits instead of putting them back where they were when Accessibility was granted.
• Showing, hiding or moving the Dock, or turning menu bar hiding on or off, fits the tiles to the new free area. Before, they kept the old one until something else changed. Windows you moved after a display was plugged in or out also stay put now; before, a later config reload could send them back to where they had been before the display change.
• A window you are dragging stays under the pointer when the layout changes mid-drag, such as when another window opens, and dropping it back where it started leaves its size alone. Before, the layout wrote it back to its tile, and the drop could read as a resize into its new neighbour.
• Switching to an empty workspace stays there with app activation following on. Before, on a Mac where the switch took longer than 300 ms to land, such as an Intel Mac before macOS 27, Finder’s activation on arrival was taken for one you asked for, and dinky followed it straight back.
• Switching workspaces on two displays in quick succession lands each display where it was sent. Before, a switch asked for while the other display’s switch moved the pointer could be dropped.
• Focus borders show up on the Space you switch to when macOS sends dinky no event for the switch, as with some swipes another app posts. Before, dinky kept drawing borders for the old Space until something else redrew them (#30).
• On macOS before 27, apps that stop drawing while hidden, like Ghostty, show their content after a workspace switch. Before, the switch skipped macOS’s animation, so their windows were never told they were visible again. A switch across several workspaces plays the animation once, for the last step.
• A dinky.toml that is a symlink is followed properly: a link to a missing file, such as one into a dotfiles checkout not cloned yet, stays a symlink instead of being replaced by the default config, and replacing the link itself, as ln -sf or a dotfiles tool does, reloads the config.
• Resizing with the keyboard leaves a window alone when it shares its container with ten or more others, as after flatten-workspace-tree with eleven windows. Before, growing it made it vanish.
• join-with left and right in the scrolling layout put a window into the neighbouring column even when it sits side by side with another inside its column. Before, it joined that other window instead.
• A CLI argument with both ' and " in it, such as a --format of it's "%{app-name}", or one starting with a combining accent, reaches dinky as typed. Before, quotes were lost, and some mixes swallowed the flags after it.
• When dinky can’t listen to the keyboard, as can happen right after Accessibility is granted, it keeps trying and the menu bar shows ! with a menu line saying the key bindings are off. Before, the bindings stayed dead until dinky restarted.
• exec-and-forget finds Homebrew’s commands on Intel Macs, where Homebrew lives in /usr/local, and dinky doctor says dinky is developed and tested on macOS 27 instead of claiming every build was built against 27.0.

0.19

Tiling

• New [workspace.<number>.display.<pattern>] tables give a workspace other settings while it is on one display, such as two fixed columns on an ultrawide and an accordion on the laptop screen. When you dock or undock, the workspace switches layout as it moves.
• Switching workspaces is lighter and no longer sets windows gliding. A switch reads only the workspace you arrive at and lays it out only if something changed there while you were away, so its windows are in place as it shows.
• Dragging a window is lighter, so the drag stays smooth and its border keeps up.

Key bindings

• hyper and meh name the usual modifier combinations: hyper-1 is alt-ctrl-cmd-shift-1, and meh-1 is alt-ctrl-shift-1.

Rules

• New app-id-regex key matches the bundle ID by regex, like app-name does for the app’s name: app-id-regex = '^com\.jetbrains\.' covers every JetBrains app with one rule. app-id still matches exactly.

Hooks

• New display-changed hook runs when a display connects or disconnects, once the workspaces have moved, with DINKY_DISPLAYS and DINKY_PREV_DISPLAYS set to how many displays there are now and were before. React to docking and undocking without Hammerspoon.
• exec-and-forget has dinky itself on PATH, so hook scripts can call dinky when the app was started from Finder.

Fixes

• Turning dinky off takes its borders away and leaves window drags alone: no drop outlines, and no swap or resize remembered for when it comes back on.
• dinky keeps tiling a window after its app closes and reopens it, as Slack does when you close its window with Cmd-W and open it again from the Dock.
• Terminal windows shrink again. Terminal sizes its windows in whole rows and columns, so it never lands exactly on its tile; a size now counts as a minimum only when the window comes back at it for two different sizes asked, so that miss no longer passes for one. Minimum sizes saved by earlier versions are forgotten once.
• move, join-with and resize succeed when there is nothing to do, such as move left on a window already at the left edge: the CLI prints move left: nothing to do and exits 0, so launchers like LeaderKey show no error.
• A layout command keeps a fixed workspace’s template when it leaves its shape alone, such as one that changes nothing or turns the overflow accordion vertical, so later windows still fill the grid.
• Releases say they need Apple silicon, so a dinky built from source on an Intel Mac doesn’t offer to update itself to one, and brew install stops with a clear message.

0.18

Key bindings

• New [modifiers] table picks which key of each modifier pair your bindings answer to: 'both' (the default), 'left' or 'right'. With alt = 'left', left Option runs dinky’s bindings and right Option types special characters like ˙ and ≈ as usual.

0.17

Menu

• Layout > Scrolling switches the focused window’s workspace to the scrolling layout.

Fixes

• Switching more than one workspace away no longer stops on the workspaces in between. Before, macOS briefly activated the app on each one it passed, which put that app into the Cmd-Tab order. Multi-step switches are faster too.
• Borders stay on while focus moves during an animation, such as scrolling the scrolling layout. Before, the borders of the window losing focus and the one gaining it blinked off until the windows arrived.
• Switching workspaces works with natural scrolling off. Before, on macOS 27 the swipe went the wrong way and bounced back to the workspace you were on, and following an app from the Dock or Cmd-Tab failed the same way.
• Switching workspaces on macOS before 27 uses the swipe those versions understand. Before, it bounced back there too.

0.16

Tiling

• New scrolling layout, after niri and Hyprland: windows open as columns in a row that scrolls past the display edges to the focused one. Columns are 0.49 of the display wide by default, as Omarchy sets them ([scrolling] column-width); a lone column fills the display. Columns out of view hang off the edge with a sliver showing, an inner gap from the columns in view, or wait behind the columns in view where another display is beyond.
• layout scrolling switches the focused workspace to scrolling and layout tiles or accordion back, and layout with several names now cycles through them: layout tiles accordion scrolling.

0.15

Tiling

• New windows open on the focused display, unless a rule moves them.

Fixes

• An empty workspace activates Finder, even with the desktop turned off, so typing no longer goes to an app on another workspace.

0.14

Install

• The Homebrew cask installs on macOS 15 or later, as the app supports. Before, it asked for a newer macOS.

Command line

• dinky -v prints the version, like dinky version and dinky --version.

Fixes

• Switching to an empty workspace keeps focus on its display. Before, macOS could hand focus to a window on another display, so typing and the next workspace next went there. focus-monitor onto an empty display also takes the keyboard off the other display’s window.

0.13

Tiling

• Windows that can’t go full screen float on their own, like Finder’s copy progress window, About This Mac and Calculator. Terminals and editors that can hide their title bar still tile. Set float-windows-without-fullscreen = false to tile them as before, or tile a single app with a layout tiling rule.

0.12

Fixes

• Cmd-Tab to an app on another workspace brings that app’s window to the front when you get there. Before, another app could stay in front, and for an app with windows on several workspaces dinky could go to the wrong one.

0.11

Fixes

• Obsidian and other Electron apps tile again. Their windows could keep a slot in the layout while staying where they were, with other windows tiling around the empty slot.

0.10

Scripting

• dinky list-modes --current prints the binding mode dinky is in, and mode-changed hooks get $DINKY_MODE and $DINKY_PREV_MODE, so a bar can show the mode.

Menu

• Clear Saved Minimum Sizes in the menu, or dinky clear-minimum-sizes, forgets the minimum window sizes dinky has learned for each app, so windows can tile smaller again after an app lowers its minimum.

0.9

Menu

• The menu bar menu has every command: focus, move, join, resize, layout, displays and modes as well as workspaces. Each item shows the key bound to it, and bindings no item covers are listed under Other Key Bindings.

0.8

Fixes

• Sleeping and waking, or anything else that makes displays drop out and come back, no longer piles other workspaces’ windows onto workspace 1. Once the displays settle, each window goes back to its workspace.
• After displays come or go, windows that apps moved around on hidden workspaces snap straight back into their tiles when you next visit, instead of gliding in from wherever the app put them.
• workspace prev and workspace next no longer get stuck on a display with nothing on it. A display focused with focus-monitor or focus --boundaries all-monitors-outer-frame stops counting as focused once dinky focuses a window or a display comes or goes, even when that window had focus before.

0.7

Fixes

• Unplugging the display dinky was animating on no longer leaves windows stuck mid-glide at odd sizes. Animations continue on the display that is main now, and a glide that stalls for any other reason lands its windows within a couple of seconds.

0.6

Motion

• Windows take about 150 ms to glide to their tiles by default, up from 50. Set [animations] duration-ms to change it.

Fixes

• The minimum sizes dinky learns for an app are kept across quits and enable off; restoring windows no longer overwrites them with the ones from launch.
• A new window that reuses a closed window’s id is tiled instead of being left where it opened.
• When macOS moves a display’s Spaces to another display, their layouts move with them instead of starting over.
• A minimized window keeps its border, hidden, instead of getting a new one when it comes back.
• move-window-to-display --follow focuses the moved window as reliably as move-window-to-workspace --follow does, instead of sometimes leaving the layout behind on the old window.
• dinky help says what enable off does: it stops tiling and restores every window.

0.5

Motion

• Windows glide to their tiles instead of jumping. Set the speed with [animations] duration-ms (50 by default) or turn it off with enabled = false. It’s off while macOS’s Reduce Motion is on.
• While you drag a tiled window, dinky outlines the tile it came from and the tile it will swap with. The window now swaps with the tile under the pointer, not the one under its centre. [drag] placeholders = false turns the outlines off.

Layouts

• flatten-workspace-tree puts windows back into the workspace’s configured layout: a fixed grid gets its cells back, and an accordion workspace becomes an accordion again.
• move past the edge of an accordion that fills the workspace takes the window out of it, into a tile beside the accordion, as in AeroSpace.

Other

• dinky warns when another window manager is also running, with a ! in the menu bar, a line in the menu and in dinky doctor. Two window managers undo each other’s layouts, which looks like dinky failing to tile.
• The update window shows what changed, and every release is listed at dinky.rodeo/changelog.

Fixes

• Clicking between two windows of the same app moves focus and the border to the window you clicked.
• A window put into native full screen, or slow to finish a resize, no longer teaches dinky that its app can’t shrink. That could leave every window of the app filling the screen.

0.4

Upgrading: workspaces are now numbered across all displays. workspaces is the total rather than a count per display, and workspaces inside [display.<pattern>] is now a config error. Use [workspace-to-display] to put a workspace on a particular display.

Workspaces

• Workspace numbers stay put when you dock or undock. Each workspace is one Space, on the main display unless [workspace-to-display] places it elsewhere.
• dinky removes Spaces it no longer needs instead of letting leftovers pile up.
• Tiled windows keep their layout when their workspace moves to another display.
• workspace N goes to whichever display the workspace is on; workspace prev and next step through the focused display’s workspaces.
• Queries, hooks and the menu bar use the new global numbers.

Layouts

• New fixed layout: give a workspace a grid with [workspace.N] columns and rows. New windows fill empty cells without resizing the others; when the grid is full, expand adds a column, adds a row, or stacks windows in the last cell.
• default-tiling = false leaves workspaces untiled unless a [workspace.N] table turns tiling on.
• dwindle is accepted as another name for the tiles layout.

Fixes

• Cmd-Tab to Helium and Safari web apps switches Spaces again.
• workspace-back-and-forth returns to the workspace you were on, not a Space you swiped past.