A tiling WM for Windows that actually felt good

AmethystWindows brought macOS-style automatic tiling to Windows 10: arrange windows in a tall, wide, fullscreen, or grid layout; move focus and windows with the keyboard; never drag a title bar again. Multi-monitor aware, virtual-desktop aware, and small enough to live in your tray without making a fuss.

It found its audience. Over 400 stars, 30 releases across two and a half years of active development, and a steady trickle of patches from contributors who cared. For a while it was one of the better answers to the question “is there an Amethyst for Windows?”

Why it’s archived

Windows 11 introduced enough changes to the windowing and DWM internals that keeping AmethystWindows working would have meant rewriting most of the core. Rather than chase that as a side project.

What you can still do with it

• Read the source. It’s a working example of a Win32-interop tiling WM in C# / .NET — useful if you’re building something similar.
• Fork it. The license permits it. Several forks have done exactly this.

What it taught me

Shipping a desktop app to a real user base, solo, across thirty releases, is a particular kind of education. Most of what I now build at right right — small, native, opinionated, designed for a specific kind of power user — comes from what AmethystWindows taught me about that loop. The patterns repeat.

If you found AmethystWindows useful at any point, a star on the repo still helps people find it.