GitHub - LGUG2Z/komorebi: A tiling window manager for Windows 🍉

One of the great things about building your own tools is that you get to have your desired workflow and user experience with very few compromises. I built Notado because I wanted an archiving and highlighting workflow which treated online comments as first class citizens. I built Kullish because I wanted to be able to quickly aggregate comments about links from a variety of different online communities. I built komorebi because I wanted a tiling window manager for Windows. Since starting to build komorebi in 2020, the project has grown beyond my wildest expectations, with over 200k downloads and a thriving online community today. Komorebi came from a desire to improve my Windows experience as a macOS + yabai user. Now, from a desire to improve my macOS experience to match the experience of using Windows + komorebi, I am building komorebi for Mac. I aim to be able to share a single komorebi configuration file across both Windows and macOS and have a virtually indistinguishable tiling w…

LGUG2Z

I made $901.49 in my first month selling commercial use software licenses. This $901.49 came from 14 customers, 6 of whom purchased monthly license subscriptions and 8 of whom purchased annual license subscriptions. January 2025 sales overview My most popular piece of software, komorebi, is a tiling window manager for Windows, published under an educational source license which does not permit any kind of commercial use. At the beginning of 2025, I started offering dedicated individual commercial use licenses for people who want to use it at work. These are the main steps that I took in January to disseminate information about the new license: I run a community Discord server centered around komorebi with almost 2000 members - I pinged @everyone with a launch announcement, which was positively received In the release overview video for komorebi v0.1.32 I dedicated a section to introduce the license to …

There are two points of popular open source mythology this post will share my experience with: People won't use your project if you don't use an Open Source Initiative-approved license People won't contribute to to your project if you don't use an Open Source Initiative-approved license Many people have ideas about how society should be like and what must be done to change institutions and to work for a revolution. But this is not enough. Often these ideas do not conform to reality and if they do conform to reality there is only one way to test them: Try to put them to work and see if they succeed. Testing our ideas in concrete work is the only way we will ever know if they are correct. -- James Forman - Twenty Enemies (1971) I maintain a tiling window manager for Windows called komorebi which is made available under the Komorebi License. The Komorebi License is both an educational source license which ensures the availability of source code to individuals for personal use, modifi…

A program is educational source (edu source) software if: The source code is available to individuals for personal use, modification, learning and reference komorebi is edu source software, and the Komorebi License is an edu source license.[1] Any software license which ensures access to source code fulfils the criteria to be considered an edu source license. [1]: In addition to being an edu source license, the Komorebi License is also a firewall license, which serves to protect an individual's freedom to refuse by default.

I can’t come to the phone right now because I’m too busy not moving windows around.

I need to stop procrastinating.

It was during the shutdowns of 2020 that I became increasingly frustrated with my Intel MacBook pro. It was slow, loud and hot; all the things that many people, myself included, dislike about laptops. I decided to build a PC. After a month or so spent scouring the internet for parts, I had assembled a PC. I ran Pop!_OS for a while, but this being my first desktop machine in over a decade, I spent a fair about of time dual booting into Windows to play all the video games that I missed out on as a macOS user. I was exposed to WSL2, which I came to find was quite a pleasant development environment. My only issue was that I could not find a tiling window manager for Windows that would bring me close to the productivity that I had with yabai on macOS. I decided to build my own. My first attempt was called yatta. If you look at the code, I think it's pretty obvious that this was my first time working with the Win32 API and that this project was largely an exercise of learning in public. Afte…

The past few weeks I have been putting off updating my personal website, which has sat untouched since October 2019. I've done quite a lot of interesting work since 2019, so finally this past weekend, I forced myself to sit down, clone the repository, and update it. My personal website is nothing fancy; just a static website built with Hugo and a community theme, and hosted on S3. This should be simple, right? Wrong. After cloning the repository and trying to build the website, I'm told that I'm missing a theme. For as long as I have used Hugo, the themes ecosystem has been dependent on using Git submodules. I'm not a huge fan of using them, but it's fine. My website uses the

For the last few years I have been writing and maintaining a tiling window manager for Windows that has steadily grown in usage and popularity. My first exposure to tiling window managers was on macOS with kwm (which was succeeded by chunkwm and later yabai). Naturally, this meant that whenever I used Linux, I would reach for bspwm. I am a big proponent of what I call the

Last year I read the excellent article

I have a confession to make. Until yesterday, I did not have any form of dotfiles management or versioning for my Windows 11 machine. Yes, I, the person who wrote an entire tiling window manager for Windows from scratch in Rust, did not manage my dots. I had to sheepishly admit this on more than one occasion in the project Discord server when people would watch my live programming videos and then ask if I could share my Windows dotfiles repo. I became a full time NixOS user earlier this year. I tried running it as my main OS for a few months, but the Linux desktop experience still leaves a lot to be desired, and one of the downsides of writing a tiling window manager that does everything that you want it to do exactly the way you want it to do it, is that going back to other tiling wms that you thought were great before becomes harder. So I settled on running Windows 11 with komorebi as my

Certainly, no contributors get into projects with the sole purpose to get a financial gain out of them. Open source has never been about money either. But for you as an author, the lack of funds to sustain your ideas and pay for even a small portion of the time you're spending on them is—I'm not going to lie—devastating. It may not be your concern at first but it will inevitably become one when your ideas gain popularity, demanding significantly more time than there are hours in a day. Source In 2023 I received $593.02 in sponsorships via GitHub Sponsors for my work on komorebi, the tiling window manager for Windows, which has continued to grow beyond my wildest dreams; it currently has 6.5k stars on GitHub, 57k downloads and almost 1000 members in the community Discord. Below is the monthly breakdown of the sponsorships received last year: MonthPayout January$27.61 February$26.77 March$35.71 April$81.00 May$46.00 June$32.00 July$31.00 August$33.32 September$52.83 October$66.37 Nove…

komorebi for Windows and komorebi for Mac are tiling window managers written in the Rust programming language, published under the Komorebi License. The Komorebi License does not permit any kind of commercial use (i.e. using komorebi at work). A dedicated Individual Commercial Use License is available for those who want to use either komorebi for Windows or komorebi for Mac at work. Separate license purchases are required for komorebi for Windows and komorebi for macOS. The Individual Commercial Use License adds

In 2024 I received $1861.88 in sponsorships via GitHub Sponsors for my work on komorebi, the tiling window manager for Windows, which has continued to grow beyond my wildest dreams; it currently has 10k stars on GitHub, 106k downloads and almost 2000 members in the community Discord. Below is the monthly breakdown of the sponsorship payouts received in 2024: MonthPayout January$92.35 February$115.48 March$143.03 April$150.30 May$188.39 June$158.49 July$122.83 August$144.12 September$179.28 October$116.09 November$229.00 December$222.52 In the post covering 2023, I wrote: It's unlikely that I'll hit the $100 minimum payout threshold on the channel in 2024, but technically, the work I put into the YouTube channel in 2023 has opened the possibility for users to financially support the project in a passive way by subscribing to the channel and watching videos. In February 2024 my YouTube channel became monetized. I have continued posting live development and release overview videos to …

For the past two years (2023, 2024) I have been sharing annual sponsorship breakdowns for komorebi. komorebi is published under the Komorebi License (building on the foundation laid by the PolyForm Project), an educational source license which does not permit any kind of commercial use. In January 2025 I introduced the long-requested Individual Commercial Use License (ICUL), which will also be factored in to this year's financial breakdown. The Numbers In 2025 I received $12,070 for my work on komorebi. SourceTotalSubscribers (EOY) ICUL$787795 GitHub Sponsors$362967 Ko-Fi$3584 YouTube$2066328 GitHub Sponsors Within a couple of months of the availability of the ICUL, the number of license holders had surpassed the number of GitHub Sponsors, and this trend shows no sign of reversing. Generally I am happy with this because I would much rather that the majority of funding for komorebi come from corporate expense reimbursements than the salaries of workers. In the last quarter of 2025 I st…

In which I give you yet another reason to ignore the naysayers