Compatibility, Requirements & Limitations

OmniWM is designed for a specific modern Mac configuration. Check the requirements and tradeoffs below before installing so you can decide whether it fits your system and workflow.

Supported Macs and macOS

Apple Silicon only — Intel Macs are not supported.
macOS 26 Tahoe or later — core window management supports macOS 26. Hidden Bar concealment and optional issue-report rewriting require macOS 27 or later.
Issue-report rewriting — Rewrite & Format with AI also requires enabled Apple Intelligence and an available local model. Manual reporting remains available without it.
System Integrity Protection stays enabled — official releases do not require disabling SIP.

Required macOS permissions

Accessibility is required to discover, focus, move, and resize application windows.
Input Monitoring is required for global hotkeys and optional System Hyper Trigger keys or mouse buttons.
Screen Recording is optional. Without it, OmniWM still tiles windows. Overview thumbnails, drag previews, and captured Hidden Bar glyphs are unavailable. Wallpaper previews fall back to macOS’s image URL, which may show the system default image instead of a native solid colour.
Full Disk Access is optional. Only Hidden Bar uses it; without it, Hidden Bar is unavailable.

See the installation guide for the exact setup sequence.

Spaces configuration

Displays have separate Spaces must be enabled in System Settings → Desktop & Dock → Mission Control. OmniWM keeps running but pauses window management while that setting is disabled.

For the clearest behavior, keep one native macOS Space per display and navigate with OmniWM workspaces. Extra native Spaces are tolerated, but windows on inactive native Spaces are left to macOS and are not tiled until their Space is active.

Other window managers

Do not run another resident window manager alongside OmniWM. At launch, OmniWM checks for a second OmniWM instance and for AeroSpace, Amethyst, bobrwm, Glide, komorebi, Nehir, Paneru, parket, Rift, Tangrid, TrimWM, yabai, and Yashiki. When a conflict is found, window management does not start until the other manager exits.

Private Apple frameworks

OmniWM uses public macOS frameworks and selected private Apple APIs. This enables capabilities that public APIs do not expose, but private interfaces can change in a future macOS release. OmniWM therefore pins a strict supported macOS baseline and validates new releases against that baseline.

Hidden Bar uses macOS per-app menu-bar visibility preferences, whose stored format is private to macOS.

Current functional limitations

Dwindle restore scope — After a restart OmniWM rebuilds each Dwindle workspace from the persisted placements: split orientation and ratio, tab-group membership, tab order, and the active tab. Fullscreen state and the selected window are not restored, and once a window without a persisted placement is present, later windows insert normally instead of being placed from the catalog.
Scratchpad membership — Window membership lasts for the current OmniWM process. Scratchpad labels persist, but memberships do not.
Inactive native Spaces — Windows on inactive native Spaces remain under macOS control until their Space becomes active.
Concurrent window managers — OmniWM intentionally refuses to start window management when another resident manager could issue competing frame or focus changes.

Release integrity

Official GitHub release builds are Developer ID signed and Apple-notarized. Downloads and release notes are published through the OmniWM GitHub releases page. OmniWM is free and open source under the GPL-2.0-only license.