TileOrg vs Amethyst: Automatic Tiling vs Project Organization

Amethyst brings Linux tiling to macOS

Amethyst is a free, open-source tiling window manager inspired by xmonad. It automatically arranges every window into layouts — tall, wide, fullscreen, column, and more. Open a new window and it tiles itself. Close one and the others redistribute.

For developers coming from i3, dwm, or xmonad on Linux, Amethyst is the most natural transition to macOS. No manual window positioning — everything tiles.

The tradeoff of automatic tiling

Automatic tiling is opinionated. Every window gets tiled, including apps that don't benefit from it — Slack, Spotify, system preferences. You can configure exceptions, but out of the box, Amethyst assumes you want everything tiled all the time.

More importantly, Amethyst doesn't group windows by project. It tiles whatever's on screen. If you have windows from three different projects open, they all get tiled together. Switching context means closing or hiding windows and opening new ones — Amethyst rearranges them, but it doesn't manage which windows belong together.

How they compare

Feature	Amethyst	TileOrg
Price	Free	$29 one-time
Tiling	Automatic (all windows)	Per-project pane layouts
Layout algorithms	Many (tall, wide, BSP, etc.)	Focused (split, grid, single)
Project grouping	No	Yes
Context switching	Manual hide/show	One shortcut per project
Session persistence	No	Yes
Learning curve	Medium (tiling WM concepts)	Low
Open source	Yes	No

Two mental models

Amethyst thinks in layouts: "How should all visible windows be arranged on screen?"

TileOrg thinks in projects: "Which windows belong to this work, and how should they be arranged?"

If you want a tiling WM that handles every window automatically and you're comfortable with the tiling paradigm, Amethyst is excellent and free.

If you want to define project contexts — "these 4 windows are my API project, these 3 are the marketing site" — and switch between them instantly with everything persisted, that's TileOrg's territory.

Can they coexist?

Not easily. Both tools manage window positions, so running them simultaneously would cause conflicts. Choose one approach: automatic tiling (Amethyst) or project-based organization (TileOrg).

For more options, read our best macOS window managers comparison. Or see how TileOrg compares to yabai, another power-user tiling tool.