At work, we recently transitioned everyone to MacBooks. Iā€™ve never used one before, and had spent the past decade on Linux laptops which Iā€™ve gradually refined to my liking.

Hereā€™s an inconvenient truth ā€” these machines are not designed to meet my needs. Being able to modify them to meet those needs has been a challenge.

My philosophy is that the tools I use should behave the way I tell them to. This post describes some of the issues Iā€™ve encountered trying to achieve that, and how Iā€™ve worked around them. Overall, Iā€™ve been able to get a workable setup.

Windows and Workspace Management

One of the most important aspects of my workflow is the ability to manage windows and workspaces efficiently.

I typically have 10 workspaces, with a relatively strict purpose for each one, and map each to a keyboard shortcut, usually super+[0-9]. That way I can quickly switch between different tasks and contexts (e.g., text editor is in super+1, email in super+9, etc). I can also move windows between workspaces using super+shift+[0-9].

macOS has a concept of ā€˜Spacesā€™, which are virtual desktops, but the behaviour I required of sending windows to specific spaces and switching between them with keyboard shortcuts wasnā€™t available out of the box. I had to install a third-party window manager called yabai.

Yabai is a tiling window manager, which means that it automatically arranges windows in a grid-like layout. This isnā€™t something Iā€™ve bothered with before, but Iā€™ve gotten used to it, and Iā€™ve ended up liking it. Iā€™ve even enabled tiling windows on my Debian laptop, through KDE Plasma. It also helps to deal with the limited memory of the MacBook, since it pushes me to not have too many windows open at once.

Alas, Yabai and some other tools had some issues when the macOS Tahoe update came out in September 2025. This initially broke my setup, and made me feel like there was a small-calibre bullet in my skull, as it made everything much harder to use. Some patches have been released since then, and things are mostly working now.

Example Yabai configuration:

#!/bin/bash

# Re-inject scripting addition if Dock restarts
yabai -m signal --add event=dock_did_restart action="sudo yabai --load-sa"
sudo yabai --load-sa

# Update workspace number in SketchyBar
yabai -m signal --add event=space_changed action="$HOME/.config/sketchybar/plugins/space_display.sh"

# Set default layout to tiling (bsp)
yabai -m config layout bsp

# Window padding and gap between tiles
yabai -m config top_padding         0
yabai -m config bottom_padding      0
yabai -m config left_padding        0
yabai -m config right_padding       0
yabai -m config window_gap          0

# Focus behavior
yabai -m config mouse_follows_focus on
yabai -m config focus_follows_mouse autofocus

# Automatically rebalance split tree when windows are closed
yabai -m config auto_balance on

# Warp new windows into the tree (default tiling behavior)
yabai -m config window_placement second_child

# Enable window shadows and blur for floating windows (optional)
yabai -m config window_shadow on

# Make full-screen toggle (green button) act like regular zoom
yabai -m config window_opacity off

# Optional: float certain system apps (you can add more)
yabai -m rule --add app="System Preferences" manage=off
yabai -m rule --add app="System Settings" manage=off
yabai -m rule --add app="Software Update" manage=off
yabai -m rule --add app="App Store" manage=off
yabai -m rule --add title="Preferences" manage=off

# Optional: make the Dock not steal space if it's visible
yabai -m config window_shadow               off
yabai -m config window_opacity              off

You may wish to add spacing between windows, but I prefer to have none.

Keyboard shortcuts

I used skhd to manage the keyboard shortcuts for Yabai.

For example,

ctrl - 1 : yabai -m space --focus 1

ctrl - m : yabai -m window --toggle zoom-parent
ctrl + shift - c : yabai -m window --close

ctrl + shift - 1 : yabai -m window --space 1

I became frustrated with additional Mac keyboard issues and made further changes.

The Keyboard

The Mac keyboard is a bit different from a standard PC keyboard. And the keycaps are labelled differently. That layout doesnā€™t fit my needs, so Iā€™ve had to make some changes.

First thing I did was remap the modifier keys in System Settings -> Keyboard -> Modifier Keys. I set Caps Lock to Command (to avoid Emacs pinky), and Command to Option (aka Alt). And the Option to Control (aka the Super key). You may want to swap the Command and Control keys instead, if youā€™re used to the classic Ctrl-c and Ctrl-v shortcuts for copy and paste.

The Mac keyboard is also missing a delete key, so I used an app called Karabiner-Elements to map Shift+Backspace to Delete. It has a GUI for remapping, and also has a JSON config file.

So for that example we can have:

{
    "profiles": [
        {
            "complex_modifications": {
                "rules": [
                    {
                        "description": "Shift + Delete = Forward Delete",
                        "manipulators": [
                            {
                                "from": {
                                    "key_code": "delete_or_backspace",
                                    "modifiers": { "mandatory": ["shift"] }
                                },
                                "to": [{ "key_code": "delete_forward" }],
                                "type": "basic"
                            }
                        ]
                    },

Other remaps worth considering include tilde (~), quote ("), at (@), and backslash (\).

External Monitor Issues

One of the most surprising issues was connecting to an external monitor. I like to connect the laptop to an external monitor, and I want the external monitor to be my only display (i.e., turn off the laptop screen). One monitor is sufficient for my workflow. It turns out, for some reason, this isnā€™t possible in Mac out of the box.

One can use ā€œclamshell modeā€, where if you close the laptop lid, the external monitor will become the only display. However, this means that you cannot use the laptop keyboard, and I prefer to use the laptop keyboard for consistency.

I had to install third-party software to achieve this, called BetterDisplay. In its settings, I then navigated to Displays->Overview->Connection Management Settings->Disconnect built-in display when an external display is connected. This capability should be built into the OS; it exists in most other systems.

SketchyBar

As part of using Yabai, I wanted a status bar that could show me the current workspace Iā€™m using. However, out of the box, I couldnā€™t find a way to do this.

Therefore I used a third-party status bar called SketchyBar, which is highly customizable.

I opted to keep it simple, with the current workspace number, to the right of the battery level.

Screenshot of desktop

The default macOS status bar remains accessible with this configuration:

sketchybar --add item hide left \
           --set hide script="sketchybar --bar hidden=on; sleep 5; sketchybar --bar hidden=off" \
           --subscribe hide mouse.entered.global

But Iā€™m grateful that SketchyBar exists, since thereā€™s a lot of unnecessary menus and icons in the default Mac status bar.

Hiding the Mouse Pointer

I havenā€™t fully reached the point of never using the mouse, especially when much of the web is still designed for mouse interaction. However, I tend to use the mouse a lot less than most people. Therefore, I want the mouse pointer to disappear when Iā€™m not using it. To achieve this, I used a third-party app called cursorcerer.

Emacs

The Emacs Plus formula from Homebrew is pretty good, but it doesnā€™t install a .app file into /Applications by default.

I had to copy the .app file into /Applications for the shortcuts to work.

sudo cp -R /opt/homebrew/opt/emacs-plus/Emacs.app /Applications

I also had to add (add-to-list 'default-frame-alist '(undecorated . t)) to my ~/.config/emacs/early-init.el file to remove the title bar, and rounded corners, which I consider unnecessary.

Terminal

Alas, Iā€™m not so deep in the Emacs bucket that I use it as my terminal emulator. I prefer to use a separate terminal emulator, with tabs, and an extra level of nesting with tmux.

The default terminal on Mac had strange keybindings, and the app iTerm2 had similar issues.

I ended up using kitty, which allowed me to configure the keybindings to match my needs with a simple config file.

Conclusion

There are many more issues Iā€™ve encountered, but these are the main ones that have got in the way of my workflow. There is a large community of third-party tools that may be better suited to meet the needs of your workflow, and Iā€™m sure folk out there have even better setups. For me, this was the minimum viable setup to get my work done.

On the bright side, the experience of setting up a new environment has allowed me to feed back some improvements into my normal workflow on Linux as well. For example, Shift+Backspace to Delete, and tiling window management. Also, missing the Trackpoint on the Mac keyboard has pushed me to use the keyboard more, which feels like a win (in the most meaningless sense).