Bonsplit
Tabs and splits for native macOS apps
Details
- External ID
- 46753301
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Bonsplit
- Website domain
- alasdairmonk.com
- Launched
- Jan. 25, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 245
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.9723320158102767
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Enrichment
- Theme
- macOS and desktop customization tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- window management for macos apps
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No Creating a high-performance native macOS tab and split-pane library with 120fps animations and complex drag-and-drop state management requires deep specialized expertise in AppKit, SwiftUI layout internals, and macOS windowing APIs.
What it would actually take: This requires advanced Swift, AppKit, and SwiftUI architecture using custom NSViewRepresentables or AppKit custom container view controllers (NSSplitViewController, NSPanels). The hard parts are seamless multi-split recursive tree layout mathematics, interactive tab dragging across separate window boundaries, first-responder focus chains, and coordinating 120Hz ProMotion animation frame budgets without layout thrashing.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Eclipse view management, Chrome tabs, iTerm tabs, Safari tabs, ion3/notion window manager
Concerns raised: Video not loading on mobile, Close button placement (right side of tab), Native macOS tabs are underbaked and awkward, Native tabs don't fit well with custom data models, Missing license in repository
Feature requests: Drag-and-drop to reorder tabs within panel, Close tabs to left, right, or all other tabs, Manage title elision with multiple tabs, Change pane proportions on the fly, Multiple views of same document in different tabs
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 1293 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #37 of 1294 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 88 days after the earliest competitor.
- emu · github · 2026-09-25 · 34 upvotes · similarity 0.69
- Dinky · github · 2026-09-26 · 24 upvotes · similarity 0.66
- Calyx · hn · 2026-03-12 · 28 upvotes · similarity 0.65
- Jarvey · hn · 2026-03-07 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.65
- DuoFlip · github · 2026-09-10 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.65
- Termini · hn · 2026-05-15 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.64
- TBD: a native, minimalist macOS front end for yt-dlp · hn · 2026-08-10 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.63
- window-sweaters · github · 2026-09-15 · 587 upvotes · similarity 0.63
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a dev tools tool for Sales yet.