When comparing Window Tidy vs Amethyst, the Slant community recommends Amethyst for most people. In the question“What is the best window manager for Mac?” Amethyst is ranked 5th while Window Tidy is ranked 33rd. The most important reason people chose Amethyst is:
Amethyst is published under the MIT license making it open-source and id offered completely free. This allows anyone to give the tiling window manger a try, which is great.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Easy drag and drop interface
When you want to resize a window you just drag it on the screen and your configured workspaces appear immediately, semi-transparent. Then you just drag and drop your window above the configuration that you want to use.
Pro Allows multiple workspace configurations
Window Tidy facilitates not just window sizes, but windows that are precisely sized to fit together to fill up the screen.
Pro Fine tune window sizes
You can set up windows to fit as large or as small of an area on your screen as you would like. For example, if you want a 1/3 left, 1/3, center, 1/9 top right, 1/9 center right, and 1/9 bottom right, you can and it is easy to set up.
Pro It's free and open-source
Amethyst is published under the MIT license making it open-source and id offered completely free. This allows anyone to give the tiling window manger a try, which is great.
Pro Recently updated and rewritten in Swift.
The application was written in Objective-C, but was recently updated and completely rewritten in Apple's new native language Swift.
Pro Works with keyboard shortcuts, no mouse needed
As it's designed to work closely to how xmonad, Amethyst uses keyboard shortcuts to control the windows being used, meaning no mouse input is necessary. This can make for a faster way to control windows.
Pro Multi-monitor suppport
Pro Has many common layouts to choose from (fullscreen, floating, row, column, wide, etc)
Pro Can switch between tiling and floating mode
Pro Under active development
Pro Configured via UI
No CONFIG file provides security and will avoid making amethyst crash. Instead configured via simple UI
Pro True tiling means never losing track of windows under a huge pile of others
Cons
Con Doesn't work - has been abandoned
Con Workspaces don't show up when you drag a window
Workspaces will only appear on one desktop, but not the others.
Con Can be buggy at times
Con There are more user friendly window managers available
There are certainly more user friendly window managers available for MacOS, such as Divvy or Moom. Amethyst, however, is more powerful and customizable than the more user friendly options available and therefore may be a better choice for a user looking for more advanced capabilities and customization.