• It just tiles. Open a window and it slots into the layout. Close one and the rest fill the gap. Five layouts: dwindle, master, columns, rows and monocle.
• Workspaces per monitor. Up to nine on each screen, switched independently. A small indicator on every taskbar shows where you are; click a number to jump there.
• It notices things for you. When an app on another workspace flashes for attention, its workspace gets a little dot. Click a Windows notification and HawkTile takes you to the right workspace and opens the app.
• Feels familiar. Default keys follow Omarchy's Hyprland setup, with Alt instead of Super. Commands use Hyprland's names.
• Mouse still works. Drag a window onto another to swap them, drag its border to resize, and the neighbours follow.
• Looks like Windows. Indicators follow your light/dark mode, accent color and high-contrast settings, and the focused window gets a colored border on Windows 11.
• Stays out of the way. It runs in its own process and never injects into Explorer or your apps. Turn it off and every window comes back.

1. Install Windhawk (1.7 or newer).
2. Open dist/hawktile.wh.cpp and copy all of it.
3. In Windhawk, choose Create a new mod, replace the example code with what you copied, and click Compile Mod.
4. Click Exit editing mode, then make sure the mod is enabled.
5. Your windows tile. Press Alt + Shift + P any time to pause.

To update, open the mod in Windhawk, choose Edit, paste the new version and compile again. Your settings are kept.

Heads-up: with these defaults, Alt + ← / → no longer means back and forward in browsers and File Explorer, and a few editors use Alt + Shift + arrows too. Everything can be rebound in the mod's settings.

Everything lives in the mod's Settings tab in Windhawk, in a few collapsible sections:

The Advanced tab next to Settings has a box full of JSON. That's Windhawk's export/import feature for sharing settings; you never need it.

Bind any key to any of these. <dir> is left, right, up, down (or l, r, u, d).

Keys are written like alt+shift+h, ctrl+alt+f1 or win+alt+left. Most win+ combinations belong to Explorer and won't register; the mod log tells you which ones failed.

• Where did my window go? It's probably on another workspace: check the taskbar badges. Turning the mod off always brings every window back, and so does the next start if HawkTile was killed.
• A window won't tile. Dialogs, always-on-top and non-resizable windows float on purpose. Windows running as administrator can't be moved unless Windhawk itself runs elevated.
• A window is bigger than its tile. Some apps have a minimum size; give them a bigger slot with the resize keys, or let them float.
• Windows' own virtual desktops aren't integrated yet. Switching them makes HawkTile pick the windows up again.

HawkTile runs as a Windhawk tool mod: Windhawk starts it in its own background process, where it watches window events, keeps a model of monitors, workspaces and windows, and moves windows with plain Win32 calls. Workspaces work by hiding windows, and the list of hidden windows is saved so nothing gets lost. The layout engine is a small set of pure functions covered by more than a thousand unit-test checks.

The long version is in docs/DESIGN.md, and docs/research-windhawk-mods.md collects what we learned from other Windhawk mods.

The source lives in src/ as small fragments that build.ps1 joins into the single file Windhawk needs. You only need Windhawk installed: the build uses its bundled compiler.

powershell -File build.ps1               # build dist/hawktile.wh.cpp and compile-check it
powershell -File build.ps1 -Test         # run the layout unit tests
powershell -File build.ps1 -Standalone   # dev exe; tiles your real windows, Enter quits

HawkTile was written independently, without looking at the code of other tiling window managers. How it was built, what was and wasn't used, an audit of every step and the honest limits of that claim are in CLEANROOM.md, with the full record in docs/provenance. If you contribute, please keep it that way: don't paste code from other window managers.

• Windhawk by Ramen Software, which makes mods like this possible. The tool-mod launcher comes from its documentation (see THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md).
• Omarchy for the keymap HawkTile's defaults follow, and Hyprland for the command vocabulary.
• Written by Claude (Anthropic) models under the direction of Jonatan Jacobsson: Opus planned and reviewed, Haiku wrote the code.

MIT