Amethyst

Amethyst is the tiling manager you can install on a Tuesday afternoon and still be using on Friday. Open a window and it drops into the current layout on its own; one keystroke cycles through tall, wide, fullscreen and column arrangements, another swaps two windows around. All of it is set in an ordinary preferences window with a shortcut recorder, which is the entire reason to pick it over AeroSpace.

It uses native macOS Spaces rather than replacing them. That is good for compatibility — fullscreen apps, Mission Control and Stage Manager all behave as they normally do — and bad for speed, because you keep the sliding animation every time you change desktop. Layouts are fixed sets rather than a tree, so you get less control over exactly where a third window lands.

The project has been running for over a decade, is MIT licensed, and the developer points people who offer donations towards other organisations instead. Development is unhurried: the last push was August 2026, and the version has been 0.24.x for a while.

If you keep two or three windows open and mostly want them side by side, a snapping utility is a smaller change to your habits than a tiler. Amethyst pays off once you have a dozen windows open and want to stop reaching for the trackpad.