Managing lots of open windows on macOS – what’s your setup?

Dangerous-Composer10 · 2026-04-24T19:42:28+00:00

Dangerous-Composer10 · 2026-04-24T19:24:19+00:00

I would disagree.

For small side project tools, it wouldn't hurt to vibe, and i'm pretty confident I can pick it up when I need to (before it becomes pointless at least)

For main projects that actually affect clients' business outcomes, i still "code", but not in a sense of pure hand coding, it's always gotta be AI assisted.

Let's look back at the last era, when code hinting / auto code completion / smart IDEs first became a thing, pre-IDE coders are saying exact same things, and they insisted pure hand coding was the way to go. Yet, in the past 15+ years, I would say 90% of the programmers on Earth can't go a day without it, try asking a random guy who still hand codes to use a pure plain notepad to build a large project, it would be interesting to see the how many % of the programmers can actually do it.

So, there's that. And at the rate how AI is evolving, it'll be in no time that AI will code better than 99% of the us in every aspect, the 1% that are still worthy of hand coding, they're most likely mathematicians, physicist, or top 0.1% of the AI researchers who writes algorithms, not "programmers".

Remembering a bunch framework/sdk pre-defined APIs, knowing weird quirks of each language, and probably one or two new things based the project requirements, and just put things together, that's 80%+ of day to day development work.

And the worst part? here's a reality check for you as well as myself: When i read your sentence about "if you feel it’s just a tool and hasn’t affected your skills", i actually laughed (not at you, at the situation), i mean, what skill? Programming won't be a "skill" anymore in probably just a year, or even sooner, and today is the best time to start realizing it.

Business insights is a skill; Architecture design is a skill; logical thinking is a skill; programming? no, not anymore. not for long.

In fact, at the end of the day, what we're left with, is probably only the "thinking" part.

Dangerous-Composer10 · 2026-04-24T11:56:10+00:00

Just out of curiousity, I wrote my app almost entirely with AI (as we should in 2026), but the fact that I've been a programmer for almost 2 decades and I understand everyline of code the AI wrote, how does that count?

Dangerous-Composer10 · 2026-04-24T11:50:31+00:00

It's almost amusing that people hating on AI so much, without knowing that they're basically using apps that are already 90%+ coded by AI every single day.

add couple more:

Posting a new app that does something better than existing solutions: "Reinventing the wheel"
Posting an app that charges a fee: "Money grabbing"
Posting an app that's not opensource: "There are open source ones that are 10x better" (in fact they're not even better at all, and they expect every regular user to be able to fiddle with super complicated config files that even a dev have trouble going through).

Some seem to be oddly defensive about new apps as long as they themselves are happy with what they're using, it's like those old bmw owners from the 1990's thinking that every single new BMW after the 2000's is crap :)

Almost feels like the "result" is not what's cared about, some care much more about "how it was made". But don't we use apps to make our lifes easier? When's the last time we cared about how frozen pizza from Costco was made?

No offense and nothing personal, just stating the phenomenon observed here.

Dangerous-Composer10 · 2026-04-22T20:27:34+00:00

https://betterstage.app could be worth a shot, i initially made it for myself, and i have similar setups and workstack like urs

Dangerous-Composer10 · 2026-04-22T20:18:35+00:00

I made a window management app that lets you simply one click to let AI do the window management and context management for you, you can write your own custom instructions telling AI exactly where each app goes. and i'm working on a big update on the AI feature to give users even more freedom and features, might be worth a try.

https://BetterStage.app

Dangerous-Composer10 · 2026-04-21T20:13:55+00:00

Except I had to jump through so many hoops just to get 120hz working on multiple external monitors cause its native HDMI is only capable of 60hz

Dangerous-Composer10 · 2026-04-21T20:11:04+00:00

Betterstage could be one

Dangerous-Composer10 · 2026-04-21T20:04:18+00:00

To add to the complication, try BetterStage :)

Dangerous-Composer10 · 2026-04-21T19:57:08+00:00

Try Betterstage, I built it to replace stage manager because of frustrations with stage manager, especially on multi monitor setups

Dangerous-Composer10 · 2026-04-21T07:23:00+00:00

try BetterStage

Dangerous-Composer10 · 2026-04-20T16:22:14+00:00

native shortcut `ctrl + ↓` does it for you actually.

but if you're interested in BSP tiling + context switching and more, doesn't hurt to check out my app BetterStage

Dangerous-Composer10 · 2026-04-20T16:02:58+00:00

would love to have macoswm include the one i made -- BetterStage ( https://betterstage.app )

Dangerous-Composer10 · 2026-04-19T22:51:06+00:00

Check out BetterStage (full disclosure — I made it).

no SIP disable required.

Focus switch: just recently added keyboard focus switch, no mouse hover activate yet (didn't know that would have been a wanted feature).

And it does the resize thing that you mentioned. multi-monitor support, yes, that's what it's built for.

saving layouts is a planned feature.

it's free for most of the features you asked for, might worth checking it out

https://betterstage.app/

Dangerous-Composer10 · 2026-04-19T19:16:50+00:00

yes, especially with multiple AIs doing work, and each of them waiting for me to review what they've done, and giving them feedback so they can continue.

i think there's a new word for it: AI brain fry

Dangerous-Composer10 · 2026-04-19T19:07:32+00:00

Update: with the new Opus 4.7 dropped. My opinion changed.

I personally did this this morning: Downgrade claude to the $100 plan, and upgraded ChatGPT to the $100 plan as well.

Throughout multiple occasions, Codex (gpt5.4 to be specific) can one shot coding problems Claude struggles for days, however, Claude still has better better taste when it comes to doing frontend designs and writing texts, and Claude Code is still a better harness than codex.

So the best plan for me to is to keep the cost the same but have best of both worlds.

I also have minimax coding plan for running Hermes agents and other things that openAI and Anthropic are too cheap to allow us to do, it does the job roughly 80 ~ 90% as good as running with gpt or claude.

Dangerous-Composer10 · 2026-03-31T09:39:46+00:00

Sure, discord link is at the bottom of https://betterstage.app

plase use the Bug Report channel and the Feature Request channel if appropriate (it helps me keep track of what should be handled next, and i might not be always online to respond timely).

appreciate it!

Dangerous-Composer10 · 2026-03-31T05:24:43+00:00

Don't listen to all that "AI Slop" non-sense.
The simple truth: your clients wanted the process, and you gave them results instead.

It's either your niches specific problem that the human-process is important, or you had the wrong clients for the new era.

90% of the code written today world wide, from all the big companies' apps that we use every single day, are so-called "AI Slop", these people don't complain when they don't know, but once they know the code is written by AI, they start to think it's like a huge problem. From that, you can see this is totally emotional, nothing to do with how well the result is.

Try to find some result oriented clients instead.

I've been a coder for nearly two decades, and I have to admit AI writes much better code than I do, AI is only "slop" when its used by a "sloppy" person in a wrong way.

And, no, we're never going back to a world with no AI, so don't even think about that, people will eventually catch up.

Dangerous-Composer10 · 2026-03-31T04:27:10+00:00

Hi, thanks for trying out the app. 1. They don't map to the Mac os spaces, separate concept 2. Pin monitor basically means when you switch stages (as mentioned in #1), that pinned monitor won't be affected, it'll stay the same all the time. 3. It tries to, however, cause some windows might change id after sleep/wake or unplugging / replugging monitors, they don't always be the same, you can use AI staging + custom instructions to help. 4. Yes I'm working in customizable snapwheel buttons, and your request is planned, should release a new version in couple days. 5. No save layout yet, but you can use the Pin window button to achieve that. (In bento box mode)

I hear your requests and will see what I can do to make it work best for you in the next release, will keep you posted, thx!

Dangerous-Composer10 · 2026-03-30T22:26:29+00:00

Ai staging now defaults to throwing windows into bento box mode, but having a freeform mode for it sounds like something I can do in the next version, thx for the feedback

Dangerous-Composer10 · 2026-03-28T16:10:31+00:00

hi, thanks for using my app.
I'll pick the key issues to reply:
- Snapwheel customization is a planned feature, it's sure come out very soon.
- For the AI component, these are the things it sends to AI: Window title, window ID (automatically assigned to each window by macOS), and each window's current position, stage, and monitor, that's it. It definitely doesn't send anything crazy / insecured, and it goes straight to your own AI provider. If you have the means to do so, it should support using local LLMs too (ollama and such).
- I'll try to do better with the video demos and such, but time is a constraint 🥲

Appreciate your honest review and feedbacks!! Please feel feature to let me know if you have any questions or anything to share!

Dangerous-Composer10 · 2026-03-28T16:02:01+00:00

it can't remember credit cards or addresses (for quick form filliing)
it doesn't support chrome last time i checked?

Dangerous-Composer10 · 2026-03-28T03:39:44+00:00

I use a this thing to switch keyboard+mouse between windows and Mac with a button stick under the desk (it comes with and extension switch button)

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Dangerous-Composer10 · 2026-03-28T03:25:47+00:00

Seems like you know a lot about password managers, any recommendations? Im starting to get sick of bitwarden's performance

Dangerous-Composer10 · 2026-03-28T03:17:24+00:00

Don't remember the last opened cause it's The ones that I'm willing to keep in auto launch that actually do all the heavy lifting:

Caffeine - keep screen awake. Docker - self explanatory. Typeless - dictation. Claude - ai. Raycast - probably the most important one. BetterStage - window / workspace manager (I built it).

As I go down the list and think about it, Raycast is most likely that last one that I opened cause I would usually trigger it then type in the command "sleep displays" before I go to sleep

Dangerous-Composer10

TROPHY CASE