Ribbon vs Loop: place windows yourself, or let them tile

What Loop is

Loop is built around a radial menu. Hold its trigger key, nudge the pointer in a direction, and the focused window goes there: left half, top-right quarter, maximised, centred. A live preview shows where it will land before you let go. It also has plain keyboard shortcuts, "cycles" (press the same shortcut again to step through several positions), grow and shrink, a move to the next screen, Undo, and Stash, which tucks windows away at the edge of the screen.

Loop is free under the GPL-3.0 licence and runs on macOS 13 and later. Install it with brew install loop or download the zip from its GitHub releases. It's actively developed, and its settings window lets you pick the trigger key and theme the menu.

What it doesn't do is keep a layout. Each action moves one window, once. Loop's own comparison table is upfront about this: no saved workspaces, no resizing of neighbouring windows, and no multi-finger trackpad gestures (a modifier key plus the trackpad does work).

What Ribbon is

Ribbon takes placement off your plate. On each Space, your windows line up as columns on a strip that runs past the right edge of the screen. Opening an app appends a column, and nothing else shrinks to make room. Focus moves with ⌃⌥H and ⌃⌥L (or the arrow keys), and the strip slides so the focused column is in view. A three- or four-finger swipe drags the strip directly, following your fingers.

On top of that you get width presets, stacked and tabbed columns, floating windows, per-app float rules, a strip indicator with app icons, and a Mac Setup page that checks your macOS settings. Ribbon runs on macOS 13 Ventura and later, on Apple silicon (M1 or later), for $9.99 once. The demo on the home page shows it in motion.

Side by side

When Loop is enough

• You work with a handful of windows and don't mind them overlapping.
• You want a quick, mouse-friendly way to snap a window, and the radial menu feels natural to you.
• You're happy to rearrange by hand when something new opens.
• You want free and open source.

The same is true of macOS's own tiling on Sequoia and later, which handles halves and quarters from the green window button or with fn⌃ plus an arrow key. Our page on how to tile windows on a Mac covers the built-in options, and Ribbon vs Rectangle looks at the other popular snapper.

When Ribbon is worth paying for

When placing windows turns into a chore. If you keep eight or ten windows open on a laptop screen and spend your day snapping, un-snapping and digging through ⌘Tab, a strip removes that work. Every window has a place and a width, and you scroll to it instead of uncovering it. The idea is explained in what a scrolling window manager is.

The trade-offs are real: Ribbon costs money, it's closed source, and it only does the scrolling layout. If you want a grid instead, look at AeroSpace.

Can you use Loop and Ribbon together?

There's one narrow case where it can work, and we still don't recommend it.

Ribbon tiles every normal window. If Loop moves or resizes a tiled window, the two apps disagree about where it belongs and the window jumps around. The only arrangement that holds up is using Loop strictly on windows Ribbon leaves floating: windows you floated with ⌃⌥T, apps you set to always float under Window rules, and dialogs, which float on their own. That's easy to get wrong with a reflexive press of the trigger key.

For that reason, Ribbon's Mac Setup page counts Loop as another window manager and shows a warning while it runs. The simple setup is:

1. Quit Loop from its menu bar icon.
2. Remove it from your login items so it doesn't start again after a restart.
3. Open Ribbon and check that Mac Setup shows no warnings.

You can keep Loop installed and go back to it any time by quitting Ribbon first. The setup guide covers the rest of the checklist. Ribbon is $9.99 for one Mac. All sales are final: no refunds (see the terms), so watch the live demo before you buy.