Feature request: 2D grid navigation

[mikkelricky]

Back in the day we had 2D Spaces in Mac OS X, but that was removed for unknown reasons. Then the excellent TotalSpaces2 came and rescued the day, but today that doesn't work anymore.

Now we have yabai which is excellent, but we don't have 2D grid navigation. Therefore, I've taken a stab at adding “Grid navigation” to Yabai, #2601, and I've been using it myself for quite some time.

[Bellavene]

Couldn't you do the same with shell scripts? I really don't see any problems with some jq parsing for such a simple task. In fact, yabai is perfectly made for that in mind without the need to rewrite something. The only thing that really bothers me a bit is hardcoded bsp layout. Which is manageable too sometimes, but has some real annoyances in it.

yabai -m query --spaces id

[rimi-itk]

I'm basically doing that, i.e using jq and in a shell script to navigate a grid, in https://github.com/mikkelricky/grid-spaces/blob/main/navigate and it works perfectly fine.

If the idea behind yabai is to be able to get basic information (using --query) on windows and spaces etc. and performing basic operations (using --message), then it may make more sense to keep yabai clean and use scripts to perform grid navigation and more complex operations. I could resurrect (and clean up) https://github.com/mikkelricky/grid-spaces/ if that's we way to go, or we could start collaborating on similar scripts elsewhere.

[mikkelricky]

Oh, and by the way @rimi-itk and @mikkelricky are both me …

[wouterboomsma]

I’ve been trial-running this grid-based version of yabai for the last days, and to me it feels like a very natural part of core yabai functionality. We already have north-east-south-west navigation as basic functionality within each space (e.g. yabai -m window --focus north), and this PR extends it naturally to between-space navigation. Making it part of yabai would make it more readily available to a broader audience. As an old totalspaces user I might be slightly biased here, but I would be very happy to see this added.