Does it work on macOS?

[barracuda156]

To be clear, I do not imply “working reliably”, I am aware this is under development. What I mean is a) has it been tried on macOS and b) if not, can it work there in principle or not.

[vidarh]

Not tested at all. Whether it "can work" is down to what you consider "can work". It can not act as a WM for OS X applications, as OS X GUI is fundamentally different from X11. However, if you were to get an X11 server that supports window management to run on OS X, there'd be nothing in principle making it impossible (but there are assumptions that likely would break on OS X even in that case)

In practice, if what you want is to have a window manager that will manage regular OS X windows, this won't ever be that. In that case you might want to look at e.g. Yabai

[barracuda156]

@vidarh macOS has XQuartz (Xorg server), which can be used with X11 and GTK apps. This is the context which I refer to, not native Cocoa apps.
On legacy macOS versions pretty much all modern GUI software uses X window server (because both Cocoa and Qt are broken).

I have seen you have an X server implementation in Ruby in another repo (no issues there, so I opened one here). I have no idea if all these can work with X11 on macOS, but it is interesting. Modern Ruby is supported on systems and archs of interest. Installation should be trivial, since these are gems in pure Ruby. I just need to figure out how to try setting all this up. My target system is 10.6 on powerpc, but for now we can just assume a generic macOS.

[vidarh]

As far as I understand XQuartz doesn't seem to use the regular window management mechanisms - there's mentions of a special API used to tie it into the OS X UI. But if it also supports the standard functionality wm's rely on, it is possible it could work.

I don't have an X server implementation - it's a client library for Ruby, assuming you're referring to ruby-x11/pure-x11. My guess would be that the most likely first problem would be around things like authorization, which could be fairly simple to fix