Slate Review

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Review of Slate powered by the Slant community.

Slate is a free window manager similar, originally written to replace Divvy and SizeUp due to some limitations in how each work. It attempts to overcome them by providing more configuration options.

It may be a bit daunting to get configured, but once it is done, the benefit is huge. Here is a great writeup by a dev getting Slate setup.

Slate currently works on Mac OS X 10.6 and above.

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Pros

Pro
Extremely configurable

Slate is similar to Linux WMs like Xmonad in that it is nearly infinitely configurable. You can either use the default configuration file or just Javascript for very complex/dynamic settings. Slate also offers editing a ".js" or a ".slate" file for configuration.

Pro
Based on hotkeys

Hotkeys can be set to re-size and focus windows, as well as activate layout presets.

Pro
It's free

Slate is completely free to download and use, which is a great option in a field of Mac WMs that often costs money to use.

Pro
Allows for tiling

Slate allows for customizing the config file in order to emulate tiling windows.

Pro
Lets you set default layouts

By using a feature called "snapshots", users can set up different default window layouts in Slate that they can switch to and from on the fly.

Pro
Window hints

Slate offers window hints which are an intuitive way to change window focus.

Cons

Con
Project is no longer in development

Development is no longer active on this project as of 2017.

Con
Hard to configure

There's no graphical user interface for configuring Slate, meaning it has to be done from the command line interface or by editing a config file. This makes it somewhat difficult and time-consuming.

Con
Missing features

Unable to perform all tasks of software it was meant to replace.
Can not move windows between 'Spaces' (virtual desktops).

Con
Video fail

Demonstration video failed to highlight any of the advantages of the windowing system. Or at least, the advantages were so subtly intrinsic that no-one who didn't already use the system could appreciate them.