Yabai: Setup, Tiling bsp issue

[timlkelly]

Hello, I wasn't able to find anything about this issue in the wiki or past issues, if it present, please point me in that direction.

I previously used chunkwm and skhd on High Sierra. I recently upgraded to Catalina (10.15.4), I have uninstalled chunkwm and installed yabai, however, the tiling does not seem to be working as I would expect.

Using the example yabairc and skhdrc, I am able to switch application windows via hotkey (alt + h, alt + l), so it appears that yabai is working, however, there is no tiling happening. As per the default in the example file, the layout option is set to yabai -m config layout bsp.

All windows seem to just float, or act as they normally would in macOS. My expectation is that they would tile as they did when I used chunkwm. I have checked both the err and out logs, both are empty. Sip is disabled, I have made the yabairc executable. Displays have separate Spaces is enabled in Mission Control and I have disabled Automatically rearrange Spaces based on most recent use in Mission Control.

Have I missed something in the setup? Or have I not properly configured Yabai?

[dominiklohmann]

The default option for tiling is float. You need to run yabai -m config layout bsp in your yabairc if you want it to tile by default.

The reasoning behind this is that by default, yabai should change as little as possible.

[timlkelly]

Thank you, that solved this. I am confused though because that is exactly what is in my .yabairc. Would that not change the default from float to bsp?

I noticed the same behavior when attempting to toggle the status bar. Changing it's value to on and saving / restarting yabai had no effect. However, it did turn on when I ran that command directly in the terminal.

[dominiklohmann]

Yabai looks first at .config/yabai/yabairc, then at .yabairc. If the file exists and is executable, it is executed asynchronously when yabai starts. It's likely some mistake on your end.

[timlkelly]

Hah, yes, I agree. It is most likely a mistake on my end.

I read the order in which Yabai looks for the configuration file. My thought was that because I don't have a $XDG_CONFIG_HOME dir, or a yabai dir in $HOME/.config/, it would then finally pick up the configuration file at $HOME/.yabairc.

I do have this file symlinked from another directory, however, it looks to me that it is still executable. Though maybe there's something I don't understand about symlinked files?

lrwxr-xr-x    1 tim   staff     8B Apr 15 22:16 .yabairc -> .yabairc

[dominiklohmann]

Might also be something that yabai doesn't understand about it. Maybe you can bisect the issue by just iteratively trying to adjust things until you find out what breaks it.

[timlkelly]

This turned out to be an issue with the symlink. I removed it and recreated it and it works. Thank you for the help