Website & visual tour · User guide · Roadmap & release status
A window layout manager for macOS (Linux planned). Ferrite remembers where your windows live, restores whole workspaces with one hotkey, and lets windows snap together into magnet groups that move, resize, and reflow as one.
Ferrite is not a classic auto-tiler: windows stay free-floating and may overlap. Structure is something you opt into, one edge at a time.
- Position persistence — every app's windows are remembered automatically and restored when the app relaunches, when you log in, or when your display configuration changes. No setup.
- Workspaces — snapshot your whole desktop as a named layout, per display. One hotkey restores everything: running apps snap into place, missing apps are launched and placed, stacking order included.
- Magnet groups — drag a window near another's edge and they mate flush. Tune the reach in Preferences → Magnets (32 pt by default). Choose Shrink or Nudge for shared-edge resizing and proportional outer-edge scaling, or Standard to resize only the window you grabbed. ⌘-drag carries the cluster.
- Reflow presets — one click tiles a display, or a magnet group, into columns, rows, grid, main+side (either hand), main-centre, a BSP dwindle spiral, cascade, monocle, or a weighted treemap that sizes windows by rank. Define your own too: a fixed column count, an exact X×Y grid of zones, or a main-centre split with your own proportions.
- Private by design — window titles are never written to disk, only salted hashes. The data files are built to be synced (git, Nextcloud) without leaking your browsing history.
These diagrams come from Ferrite's own layout solver, not screenshots. The rust-colored tile marks the frontmost window in these display-reflow examples.
| Main in the centre | Weighted treemap | Custom grid, 7 × 3 |
|---|---|---|
 |
 |
 |
| Keep the main window central. | Give higher-ranked windows more room. | Unused zones stay empty. |
Apply a preset to a whole display or just one magnet group. Display reflow dissolves touched groups by default; enable Keep magnet groups together to preserve them as single tiles. Explore all presets on the website →
Homebrew — available once the first notarized release (1.0) ships:
brew tap vhark/ferrite https://github.com/vhark/Ferrite.git
brew install --cask ferriteFrom source (Swift 5.9+, macOS 13+):
git clone https://github.com/vhark/Ferrite.git && cd Ferrite
./scripts/install.shThis builds Ferrite.app, installs it to /Applications, and registers Launch at Login. On first run, macOS will ask you to grant Accessibility permission (System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility) — Ferrite cannot see or move windows without it. If Login Items shows "needs approval," allow Ferrite there too.
Optional, for rebuild-stable permissions during development: create a self-signed "Ferrite Dev" code-signing identity (see the guide's Building from source section). Without it, builds are ad-hoc signed and macOS drops the Accessibility grant on every rebuild.
- Arrange your windows the way you like.
- Menu bar icon → Save Current Arrangement as Layout…, give it a name.
- Open Preferences… → Layouts and record a hotkey for it.
- Rearrange everything, then press the hotkey: your workspace comes back — including apps that weren't running.
- Drag one window's edge close to another's until the blue bar appears, release — they're mated. ⌘-drag either one to carry both.
The full manual — every gesture, menu item, preference, CLI diagnostic, and troubleshooting recipe — is in docs/GUIDE.md.
macOS-first and used daily by its author. The core engine (FerriteCore) is pure Foundation with no AppKit dependency; Linux support is planned.
266 unit tests passing. Tagged milestones have live-acceptance records in the backlog. M6 reflow presets v2 and Standard resize mode are implemented on main; their live walkthrough is in progress, so v0.12.0-m6 has not been tagged. The first notarized release and Homebrew installation remain pending.
- Rectangle (Ryan Hanson, MIT) — the proven position→size→position AX write sequence Ferrite's window driver uses, and the original seed of the exclude list (now evidence-based via
--probe-frame). - KeyboardShortcuts (Sindre Sorhus, MIT) — global hotkey recording and registration.
MIT.