Ankylix

Who It's For

Ankylix is for keyboard-first Mac users who want Vim/Vimium-style hint navigation applied to window management instead of memorizing a shortcut for every position or app. If you already reach for Vimium's link hints in the browser, Ankylix applies the same press-a-letter-to-act pattern to snapping, resizing, and switching between windows, so your hands never leave the keyboard.

How It Works

Ankylix installs as a lightweight native menu bar app (no Electron) and adds three keyboard-triggered modes, each overlaying a letter hint on screen so you "press the key and you're done." The Tiling Layouts mode labels every predefined zone with a letter — press it to snap the focused window into that zone, cycle through saved layouts with the arrow keys, or jump straight to one of nine assigned layouts with a digit key. The Move & Resize mode dims the rest of the screen and drops you into a modal editor: direction keys move the window, Shift+direction resizes it. The Focus Switcher puts a letter hint on every visible window across all connected screens — press Tab to flip between the on-window hints and a compact window list, and press M to reveal minimized windows.

Every trigger key and in-mode key is remappable from Preferences → Shortcuts, with recorder support for QWERTY, Colemak, Colemak-DH, and Dvorak layouts. Preferences → Layouts controls which zone layouts are active and their cycling order. The hint overlays themselves are fully themeable — colors, text size, borders, corner radius, and label position — with a live preview while you edit.

Compared to Similar Tools

Compared to Rectangle (free, keyboard shortcuts and drag-to-edge snapping), Ankylix replaces per-position shortcuts with a single trigger key plus an on-screen letter hint for every zone, which scales better if you use more zones than you want discrete shortcuts for — at the cost of a paid license. Rectangle has no equivalent to Ankylix's Focus Switcher or modal Move & Resize mode. Compared to app-switcher tools like rcmd (free, first-letter app switching), Ankylix's Focus Switcher operates at the window level rather than the app level, showing a hint on every visible window rather than mapping fixed letters to individual apps.

Requirements

• macOS 13 Ventura or later
• Accessibility and Input Monitoring permissions required
• €19 one-time purchase, includes all current and future 1.x updates
• 14-day free trial available, no card required
• Closed source; distributed directly from ankylix.com

Getting Started

Download the free trial from ankylix.com — there's no config file to create, everything is set up from the app's Preferences panes. Open Preferences → Shortcuts to choose a trigger key for each of the three modes, then Preferences → Layouts to pick and order the tiling zones you want available. The full walkthrough of all three modes is in the in-app guide.