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ancre

ancre

ancre is a tiling window manager for macOS, inspired by Hyprland: your windows arrange themselves side by side and one key — CapsLock as hyper — drives everything. It’s keyboard-first by design, but fully usable with the mouse: every action has a click, drag, or menu equivalent.

New to tiling? Instead of stacking windows on top of each other, a tiling window manager gives every window its own slot in a layout and keeps the screen fully used. You switch between numbered workspaces (virtual desktops) and move focus with the keyboard.

  • Layouts — dwindle (Hyprland-style spiral splitting), columns (“scroll”), stack (one window at a time), custom layouts from config templates
  • Workspaces 1–9 across monitors with stable assignment (survives replug)
  • Workspace bar — window icons, drag&drop, notification badges; positions include the menu bar and the notch
  • Hyper key (CapsLock) for every shortcut
  • Mouse-native — dragging/resizing windows the normal macOS way routes through the tiling engine (edges insert, center swaps, neighbors adjust)
  • AI ready — ancrectl CLI, unix socket, built-in MCP server, Claude skill: an agent rearranges your whole setup in one call
  • Native and safe — pure public Accessibility API, no SIP tampering, no kernel extensions (details)

Quick start

Section titled “Quick start”
Terminal window
brew tap wraithyy/tap
brew trust wraithyy/tap          # third-party taps need a one-time trust
brew install --cask ancre
open /Applications/ancre.app

Prefer building from source? See Installation.

First launch shows an onboarding window that walks you through the two needed permissions (Accessibility, Input Monitoring). Then:

Terminal window
hyper+1..9        # switch workspace     (hyper = CapsLock)
hyper+h/j/k/l     # focus in direction
hyper+t           # scroll layout
ancrectl state    # JSON snapshot of monitors, workspaces, windows

Hold hyper for 2 s to see the full shortcut cheatsheet.

Known limitations

Section titled “Known limitations”
  • Offscreen parking (hiding windows for inactive workspaces) relies on how macOS clamps AX window positions near screen edges — behavior that varies by macOS version.
  • Animations auto-disable for apps whose AX responses are too slow to animate smoothly.
  • No App Store distribution: ancre needs Accessibility access and remaps CapsLock via hidutil, both outside the App Store sandbox.
  • The app is ad-hoc signed, not notarized — Gatekeeper is satisfied via the Homebrew cask (or a manual quarantine clear from source), but there’s no Apple notarization ticket.
  • One documented exception to “public API only”: _AXUIElementGetWindow via dlsym, used to get a stable CGWindowID from an AXUIElement (the same trick yabai and Amethyst rely on); it degrades gracefully if the symbol is ever unavailable.

Where next

Section titled “Where next”