AeroSpace Soft Fork with Hyprland’s Dwindle Layout & Native macOS Interactive Workspace Bar

[BarutSRB]

For anyone using AeroSpace on macOS who’s interested in a Hyprland-style dwindle layout or a centered interactive workspace bar that blends into the native menu bar, I’ve put together a soft fork called HyprSpace.

It stays up to date with upstream AeroSpace and adds two main features:

• Dwindle layout – a binary tree tiling mode inspired by Hyprland’s dwindle algorithm.
• Centered workspace bar – an optional native macOS menu bar element showing workspace icons and open app indicators.

Everything else works the same as AeroSpace. The repo is here if you’d like to take a look:
👉 [github.com/BarutSRB/HyprSpace]

[alexmohr]

Will you keep the fork in sync with the upstream here?
I love the dwindle layout and been missing that since moving from hyprland to mac.
Is there a chance to make the central workspace bar aware of the notch on macbooks?

[BarutSRB]

Yep, the fork is (and will stay) in sync with upstream.
There’s already a notch aware option under Menu → Experimental UI Settings → Notch-aware positioning.

I totally get you, I missed Hyprland a lot also, that’s actually what pushed me to make a Hyprland style layout in the first place 😄

Niri is amazing for multi monitor setup but in my opinion nothing beats dwindle layout for single monitor.

[alexmohr]

Awesome! Thank you

[Eveeifyeve]

For anyone using AeroSpace on macOS who’s interested in a Hyprland-style dwindle layout or a centered interactive workspace bar that blends into the native menu bar, I’ve put together a soft fork called HyprSpace.

It stays up to date with upstream AeroSpace and adds two main features:

* **Dwindle layout** – a binary tree tiling mode inspired by Hyprland’s dwindle algorithm.

* **Centered workspace bar** – an optional native macOS menu bar element showing workspace icons and open app indicators.

Everything else works the same as AeroSpace. The repo is here if you’d like to take a look: 👉 [github.com/BarutSRB/HyprSpace]

Do you think it will be upstreamed to aerospace instead of a fork?

[BarutSRB]

Doubt it as it got rejected before so either Nikita wants to keep it i3 or he is waiting to fix other things first before he himself implements a Hyprland dwindle layout.

[Eveeifyeve]

Doubt it as it got rejected before so either Nikita wants to keep it i3 or he is waiting to fix other things first before he himself implements a Hyprland dwindle layout.

@nikhilmaddirala please explain your thoughts...

[alexmohr]

I assume the raised PR did not follow the community guidelines.

Failure to follow the checklist with no apparent reasons will result in silent PR rejection.

None of the checkboxes where checked. Locking the PR seems a bit harsh though :(

[nikhilmaddirala]

Doubt it as it got rejected before so either Nikita wants to keep it i3 or he is waiting to fix other things first before he himself implements a Hyprland dwindle layout.

@nikhilmaddirala please explain your thoughts...

@Eveeifyeve - Did you mention me by mistake? I don't think I'm the right person to comment on this! 😊

EDIT: I'm actually glad I got tagged here by mistake, because I probably wouldn't have learned about this interesting fork otherwise!

[nikhilmaddirala]

@BarutSRB - This looks super cool, thank you for sharing! Do you have any plans to make the installation simpler? It would be great if you could support installation via brew similar to the original aerospace.

[BarutSRB]

@nikhilmaddirala thanks a ton for the kind words and the suggestion! I’m an amateur and more of a hobbyist who mostly builds things for myself, so I’m still learning how to package and distribute projects properly. Even GitHub releases and branches are new to me since I’ve never really done community or team collaboration before. You’re absolutely right that Homebrew would make installation and updates much simpler since it would just be a quick copy-paste terminal command and updates would be easier. I’ll look into how to release through Homebrew.

it would definitely be better if the pull request can be accepted, since then I wouldn't need to worry about merge with upstream conflicts and probably get siome contributors, but at the end of the day I am a leeching off hard work done by Nikita and am basically doing makeup on top of the very complex and innovative code.

[nikhilmaddirala]

@BarutSRB Thanks for your reply, and I totally understand where you're coming from. I'm sharing some more thoughts below, but feel free to ignore - I realize that my advice is completely unsolicited! 😊

at the end of the day I am a leeching off hard work done by Nikita

Forking is not leeching! As long as you're respecting the original licenses and attributions, forking existing projects to serve different use cases is completely acceptable.

if the pull request can be accepted, since then I wouldn't need to worry about merge with upstream conflicts

True, but it's unlikely that a single project (i.e. Aerospace) can cater to all different user preferences. Even in the Linux / Wayland world there are so many different options like Hyprland, Niri, Sway, DWL, etc. and we don't expect them all to converge into a single project.

and probably get some contributors

The best way to get contributors is to start by getting users! The more users you get, the more contributors you're likely to get, because it's ultimately the users that will become contributors. And the best way to start getting more users is to make it as easy as possible for users to start using your project. Which brings me back to my earlier point about ease of installation!

Two things that would help here: (1) Installation via a package manager such as brew, (2) Avoiding namespace conflicts with aerospace - i.e. I should be able to install aerospace and HyprSpace alongside each other. I think doing these two things would significantly lower the barrier for more people to start using HyprSpace!

[BarutSRB]

Thanks a lot for the insight and advice ❤️ I’ve set up a Homebrew install and renamed things to avoid conflicts with the original AeroSpace so both can now be installed side by side:

brew tap BarutSRB/tap
brew install hyprspace

[nikhilmaddirala]

Amazing - I can't wait to try it! :)

[jps83]

Thanks for this. Think this will support Master layout as well in the future? Its very helpful on ultrawides as the parent can be center focused.

Can also be done in hyprland with Dwindles "single_window_aspect_ratio = 4 3". So when you only have one window open on the ultrawide it defaults to a 4x3 instead of taking up the whole screen. 38" of terminal or browser is just too much. Would be great if it was possible here.

[jps83]

Sweet thanks!

[BarutSRB]

I implemented the Master Layout with promote/demote windows to master from stack. https://github.com/BarutSRB/HyprSpace/releases/tag/v0.1.5

[jps83]

Thank you. And forgive my ignorance but how does this implements a solution to being able to limit a single centered app window to a specific width on an ultra wide monitor. I only suggested master as it has other options in to achieve this effect. On hyprland Ive used the Master layout like this to achieve this results:

master {
    orientation = center
    new-status = slave
    mfact = 0.57
    slave_count_for_center_master = 0 # which is the new always_center_master
    always_keep_position = true
}

or with dwindle i use

Dwindle {
single_window_aspect_ratio = 4 3
}

The master is forced to the center via a percentage of the screen (mfactor) and from there, the child apps fill around. On my linux machines since I use them docked and in laptop mode, I switched personally to Dwindle and Single window aspect ratio.

The point is that when you have a 38,40,49 inch wide monitor, when you open a single app, control over how wide that single window is, is crucial. Case in point, I don't need my browser to open full width, I want to open 4x3 aspect ratio.

Hope that clears things up. Appreciate your work thus far. The app is 90% there for me. With this addition, I think you'll make a lot of ultra wide (monitor) people really happy.

edit: spelling

[BarutSRB]

Sorry linked the wrong version, it's this one:
https://github.com/BarutSRB/HyprSpace/releases/tag/v0.1.6

or

brew tap BarutSRB/tap
brew install hyprspace

Hyprland's master layout has a few different options I just ported the defautl one with left master window and right stacked windows.

[jps83]

This is great. Thank you!

[AdrianZajkowski]

Wow, this looks amazing! @nikitabobko, do you think these ideas could be considered for future AeroSpace versions?

[BarutSRB]

Thank you ❤️

[ogdakke]

This is great. Will be switching over for good. Awesome work, @BarutSRB

[BarutSRB]

Thank you ❤️