Rooms earns trust by hiding windows instead of closing them and never phoning home

Rooms is a Mac window manager built around a single organizing idea: your desktop is not one space, it is several, and you should be able to name them and move between them without closing anything. Press ⌥Space, type a room's name, and every window belonging to that room comes forward, arranged in a layout. Everything else hides. Nothing is ever closed.

The mechanism is worth understanding precisely. When Rooms hides windows that don't belong to the active room, it doesn't just minimize them - it parks windows off-screen when they belong to an app that's also represented in the current room, and it writes down where each window belongs before moving it. If the app stops responding, the record persists and Rooms tries again on the next opportunity. Quitting Rooms, or reopening it after a crash, brings parked windows back. That's a real commitment to not losing your work.

Layouts are handled per-screen. Your laptop and an external monitor each remember their own layout for each room, and plugging a monitor in re-lays out whichever room you're in. The layout engine tries Focus, Columns, and Grid in order, falling back to Stack only when app minimum sizes make tidier arrangements impossible - and it measures those minimum sizes when you save a room, so it knows upfront what will fit. You can also save your own freehand arrangement: drag windows where you want them, press ⌘S in the switcher, and Rooms snaps it to a grid with even gaps and remembers it as "My Layout".

The rough edges are stated plainly. Rooms manages windows, not browser tabs, so a project's web content needs its own named browser window. Spaces and full-screen windows are out of scope entirely. Stage Manager conflicts with any window manager and Rooms warns you when it's on. Intel Macs and macOS versions before 14 haven't had the same hands-on testing as Apple Silicon on macOS 26.

The privacy stance is absolute: no network connections of any kind, no accounts, no analytics, no update checks. Room data lives in a plain JSON file you can read and edit directly.

The README also notes you can point a coding agent at the repo URL and ask it to install Rooms - a small but telling detail about how the author imagines the tool being used. It's a personal project built for daily use, MIT-licensed, and honest about what it doesn't do yet. That combination - clear mechanism, stated limits, no overclaiming - makes it easier to evaluate than most tools in this category.