A scrolling window manager for Mac Every window. One ribbon.

Ribbon is a scrolling window manager for macOS. Instead of overlapping, or splitting the screen into smaller and smaller tiles, every window gets its own full-height column on one long strip that runs past the edges of the screen. You move along it with a three-finger swipe or ⌃⌥ ← →, and the screen scrolls to the window you want.

Snapping apps like Rectangle and Magnet place windows in halves and thirds of one screen, and Stage Manager hides most of them in a pile. Ribbon never shares the screen out: opening a window adds a column to the strip, and nothing else changes size. It's the idea behind PaperWM and niri on Linux, built natively for the Mac.

It's the same idea, built natively for macOS. PaperWM (for GNOME) and niri (a Wayland compositor) can't run on a Mac, so Ribbon recreates their scrolling layout as a Mac app, with trackpad swipes and a settings window instead of config files. More in PaperWM for Mac and niri for Mac.

Those are tiling window managers: they split the screen between your windows, so each one gets smaller as you open more. Ribbon gives every window its own full-height column and lets the strip run past the screen's edges, so nothing shrinks. It also needs no config file and no changes to System Integrity Protection. See Ribbon vs AeroSpace and Ribbon vs yabai.

macOS 14 Sonoma or later, on a Mac with Apple silicon. A trackpad is optional: everything also works from the keyboard.

macOS only lets an app move and resize other apps' windows through the Accessibility API, so Ribbon asks for it once, in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility. It uses it to read where windows are, how big they are and what they're called, and to move them. It never reads what's inside a window, and nothing leaves your Mac.

No. Ribbon moves windows from one queue per app, only touches the two or three windows that are actually on screen while the strip scrolls, and sleeps whenever nothing is moving. Its own benchmark scrolls the strip back and forth and measures every frame: 95% of frames need about a millisecond of work or less.

Mostly, with a little setup that Ribbon walks you through. It warns if a three-finger swipe is also switching full-screen apps, or if macOS's own edge tiling is on, and shows where to turn them off. Full-screen, minimized and hidden (⌘H) windows keep their place on the strip. In Mission Control, turning on "Group windows by application" keeps the overview tidy.

Dialogs, fixed-size windows like Calculator, and windows that stay on top (picture in picture, a meeting's compact view) are left floating. You can float any window with ⌃⌥T, set an app to always float, or give it a fixed place on the strip. If a floating window ends up hidden behind the strip, ⌃⌥` brings it forward.

Yes. Every display has its own strip, its own focus and its own scroll. Swiping or ⌃⌥ → past the end carries on to the next display, ⌃⌥N sends a window there, and you can switch Ribbon off for any display.

They go back where they were before Ribbon arranged them. When Ribbon starts again, it puts the strip back in the order and widths you left it.

$15, once. No subscription. Try it free for 7 days first, with every feature and no account or card.

A window manager needs the Accessibility API to move other apps' windows, and the App Store's sandbox doesn't allow that. Ribbon is signed with an Apple Developer ID, so it opens like any other app.