A quick note on OmniWM, open source, and why giving credit matters

[BarutSRB]

​Hey everyone,
​I wanted to share an honest note with the macOS window manager community.
​Over the past months, I’ve poured countless hours, personal sacrifices, and late-night trial-and-error into OmniWM. I’m not in this for money—we all know open-source maintainers aren't getting rich off passion projects. I do this out of pure love for programming and a refusal to accept "no" for an answer when it comes to pushing what’s possible on macOS.
​Even though OmniWM is still a young project, it’s been incredible to watch it shift expectations and inspire creators across the macOS tiling WM space to strive for more.
​Here’s where I need your help:
​I genuinely don't mind people being inspired by OmniWM or porting its features to other WMs. Let the best software win. But seeing people rip out features I spent sleepless nights cracking and submitting them as PRs elsewhere without giving credit is deeply demoralizing.
​Achieving Linux-level WM capabilities on macOS takes serious pain and sacrifice. When those breakthroughs are lifted without a simple head-nod, it burns me out to the point of wanting to quit. If boundary-pushing projects die off from burnout, the whole open-source community loses.
​My simple ask:
If you pull a feature, solution, or concept from OmniWM to open a PR for your favorite WM, please give credit where credit is due.
​I don't ask for money or praise—just recognition for the work. A simple link back or a nod in the PR description costs nothing, but it serves as the motivation I need to keep building and pushing boundaries for all of us.
​Let’s keep the macOS WM space fair, innovative, and supportive.

Keep the spirit of hack the planet alive ♥️🙏☦️

[cvanelteren]

Hi @BarutSRB sucks to here that your work is being stolen. For the uninformed (like me) do you have any concrete examples where you feel that you work has not received the credits it deserves?

[BarutSRB]

​I don't consider it stolen, because I was one of them at one time when I was making GhosttyFetch. I simply instructed AI at that time to analyze fastfetch and see if it uses AppleScript or how it fetches that info, and then I guided it to write an app in Zig to display sys info while I focused on the animation system. I didn't notice until later that it basically ripped off fastfetch, but rewrote it literally in Zig.
​As for examples, I have many, but due to the nature of programming, it's very rare that you can compare code byte for byte as proof. But I notice, for example, a person forks a repo and then deletes it while submitting a PR to another WM with the new feature I released for OmniWM. There is absolutely no way for the creator of that WM to know, as he would just review the code and not go into other repos to see their commits, and this happens a few times.
​Sometimes a commit by someone else that is not the owner gets merged and gets the exact same bugs as OmniWM. I know because during that time I noticed the bugs and fixed them, and then I see exact issues opened up about the bugs I literally fixed, while at the same time noticing a commit with a feature I just introduced to OmniWM being merged a few days or hours later.

But where I was 100% certain is at times I purposely gave AI an open "vibe code" prompt to refactor or completely rewrite something while I secretly worked locally on true main and then I saw PRs some merged some denied with exactly the vibe coded stuff. For example was the zig rewrite push it was very bad, obvious to someone who would look at it yet some PRd stuff from it, and when I pushed pure swift code and reverted it back you can tell that it was intentional as at that time at least no AI can within 24h revert and push a full swift rewrite of the zig parts, but this is that reverse engineering side of me, where you are used to fake leads, so I just utilized it differently to see of my suspicions were right. None the less, I truly think if all creators of all macos WMs got together we can achieve sonething truly stunning while still respecting each other's philosophy as we can have different type of releases for example minimal for people that just want a pure wm, stable for people that want a DE Linux experience and an experimental one for people that like that Gentoo/Void or early Arch Linux vibe of bleeding edge high risk yet the rush of what's possible on being on bleeding edge.

[cvanelteren]

Where did the other reply go @BarutSRB?

[amoghyermalkar123]

@BarutSRB your work is absolutely fantastic. I personally adore it. I bought my first mac a year ago and riced it with aerospace and have been using it since. Came across your project via a random git thread in sketchybar repo discussions and never even looked at the stars on this repo. Immediately uninstalled aerospace and started using omni.

i have been a happy user since 3 weeks now and it breaks the hacker heart in me a little seeing this post.

if it works with you please share the appropriate git links where the credit is due, least we can do is atleast ask the author to give credit where its due.

[macsmister]

I echo @amoghyermalkar123 's comments. I came from Amethyst and moved my workflow to OmniWM around 3 weeks back as well. I'm not looking back! OmniWM is exceptional, I grew fond of the Niri layout, and I really like how it also includes a toolbar. I no longer use the dock, I have also relocated essential notification badges (for Outlook and Teams in particular for my work) to the menu bar with Badgeify since the Dock now remains hidden.
Side Note: I'm secretly hoping the function Baegeify provides will eventually be baked in to OmniWM as well!

Thanks @BarutSRB for starting this project, for your attention to details, for your dedication and hard work, and for making this WM not only an essential tool for many, but the de facto best WM for macOS!

[BarutSRB]

Thank you ♥️♥️♥️

[dkmar]

Hi @BarutSRB. I remember seeing you active in the tmandry Glide WM repo. Nice job making progress on a scrolling WM. I'm a little surprised to see no mention / credit to Glide or tmandry's work anywhere though. Was it not the basis for this WM? cheers

[BarutSRB]

@dkmar

No, you’re probably thinking of Rift, which is a fork of Glide.

OmniWM itself was written from scratch, which you can see in both the Git history and the current codebase. Glide was never used as a codebase or foundation for OmniWM. Before starting OmniWM, I explored several existing macOS window managers, including Aerospace, Rift, Glide, and BobrWM, because I was looking for something that could support everything I had in mind. Ultimately, none of them provided the foundation I needed, so I started OmniWM from scratch.

That said, I absolutely want to give credit where it is due. PaperWM.spoon was, as far as I know, the first real animated scrolling window manager on macOS. The first Niri-like layout work I was involved with on macOS was in Glide through my PR, with a lot of help from Tmandry, who is an incredibly knowledgeable and professional developer 🫡♥️

OmniWM is where I eventually took the idea much further and built what I consider a full Niri-style scrolling layout for macOS, alongside the other layouts and functionality I wanted OmniWM to have.

So Glide and tmandry’s work were definitely part of the journey and deserve credit, but Glide was not the basis or codebase of OmniWM.

And on that note, I would genuinely love to see Tmandry join OmniWM someday. I think we could achieve some pretty incredible things working together, especially with how much Swift itself has evolved. Swift now has a powerful ownership model with borrowing, consuming, noncopyable types, and related features that bring some of the same ideas that make Rust so attractive for systems programming into Swift, while still retaining first class access to the macOS ecosystem. I think there is a lot of unexplored potential there for a native macOS window manager, and having someone with his knowledge and experience involved would only push it further.