The calm, keyboard-first desktop for the age of agents. Every window in its place, every fix one prompt away.
Linux used to mean a weekend of config files before you could do any real work. Tatami hands you the finished room instead: a tiling desktop, a fast terminal, a curated set of apps and shortcuts that make sense from the first minute.
The name comes from the straw mats that set the proportions of a Japanese room. Nobody arranges furniture around tatami, the layout is the point. Same here: windows tile themselves, so you never drag one again.
Want it different? Every default lives in a plain text file, and your agent can rewrite any of them for you.
“Your computer should feel like a clean room: everything has a place, and nothing asks for your attention.”
The Tatami Doctrine
From the preface, written before the first line of code
A desktop that stays out of your way. Pick a scene, or let the tour play.
Tiling: Windows arrange themselves. You never drag or resize one again.
From USB stick to finished desktop in about two minutes. On a fast machine, closer to thirty-five seconds.
Write the ISO to a USB stick, boot from it and answer five questions: language, keyboard, disk, user and password. That is the whole installer.
Download the ISO
Write it to a USB stick
$ sudo dd if=tatami-2.0.3-x86_64.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=4M status=progressPrefer something graphical? Any USB writer works, including Impression and balenaEtcher.
Boot it and answer five questions
Run Tatami in a lightweight VM on an Apple Silicon Mac or on Windows 10 and 11. Nothing on your disk changes, and removing it takes one click.
$ brew install --cask tatami-vmApple Silicon Macs on macOS 14 or newer.
Already on Linux? Boot the ISO in GNOME Boxes or virt-manager and you are testing in under a minute.
A brand-new laptop, a ten-year-old Mac, or the potato in your closet.
Day-one support for current Intel, AMD and Snapdragon machines, including suspend, fingerprint readers and high refresh screens.
Intel Macs from 2013 onward boot straight in, with Wi-Fi, keyboard backlight and a trackpad tuned to feel the way you're used to.
Two gigabytes of RAM and a spinning disk? Tatami idles at 480 MB and still feels instant.
Over two thousand community plugins, and if the one you want doesn't exist yet, your agent can write it for you.
Showing 8 plugins
Spin a pixel globe and tune into live radio from 40,000 stations.
A one-bit desk pet that naps when you're idle and cheers when your tests pass.
Battery levels and noise control for wireless earbuds, right in the bar.
Minesweeper in the terminal, with vim keys and a new seed every day.
Hourly encrypted backups to any S3 bucket, with a one-click restore timeline.
Matches your keyboard backlight to the theme and dims it when you stop typing.
A tiny forecast in the bar, drawn in ASCII and refreshed every 15 minutes.
Shifts every monitor to warmer colors at sunset, each on its own schedule.
Tatami wires a terminal agent into the system, so a crash becomes a conversation instead of a forum thread.
Pick a default agent on first boot and switch any time with one command. Local models work too, nothing has to leave your machine.
When an app falls over, the notification offers to hand the crash report to your agent, which explains what happened in plain words.
Bundled skills teach your agent how Tatami is put together, so “make the bar thinner and add the weather” just works.
Works with
Browser quit unexpectedly
It crashed while playing a video. Want your agent to take a look?
~ $
One theme recolors the terminal, the bar, notifications, the editor and the wallpaper at once. It recolors this page too: press T or pick one below.
Now showing Tatami, a light theme
Everything you need to ship, installed and configured before your first coffee.
Neovim with a sensible LazyVim setup by default. VS Code, Zed, Helix, Cursor and Emacs are one menu away, already themed.
Pick Rails, Django, Laravel, Next.js, Go or Rust from the setup menu. Versions are managed by mise, databases run in Docker.
Ghostty by default, with Alacritty, Kitty and Foot integrated. Same shortcuts, same theme and the same font everywhere.
The command line tools you would install anyway, already set up to work together and themed to match.
Steam, Proton, emulators and the right GPU drivers are set up during install. Plug in a controller and go.
Thousands of Windows games run straight from your library, with the right Proton version picked for each one.
RetroArch comes ready with a CRT shader that makes old games look the way you remember them.
GeForce NOW, Xbox Cloud Gaming and Moonlight work out of the box, tuned for low latency.
Releases, plugins and the occasional milestone.
Closing the lid now sleeps properly on X Elite machines, plus a faster first boot and 41 smaller fixes.
Widgets lead the pack, and a surprising number of them are desk pets.
Both started as community themes. Press T on this page to see them.
Security researchers can report issues privately and get paid for the serious ones.
The biggest release yet brings crash reports your agent can read, bundled skills and a new installer.
Lisbon, Seoul, Austin, Nairobi and ten more. Bring a laptop, leave with a tiled desktop.
Year one, counted.
1,240,512
ISO downloads
in the first year
38,906
GitHub stars
on the main repository
2,317
Community plugins
and counting
Unedited, from people who switched.
Switched my whole team in a week. The agent fixed a Bluetooth dropout I'd been fighting since 2019 in about forty seconds.
Put it on a 2013 MacBook Air that was headed for recycling. It's now the fastest machine in the house for writing.
Pressed T on the website and watched the whole page change theme. Installed it, pressed Super + Shift + T, same thing on my desktop. Sold.
Honest review after a month: tiling took three days to click, multi-monitor is excellent, and Bluetooth codec switching still needs a nudge now and then. Staying.
Asked my agent for a bar widget that shows when my next train leaves. Ten minutes later it was a plugin. Published it the same afternoon.
Install took 52 seconds on my Framework. I timed it because I didn't believe the website.
First Linux setup where I didn't open a single config file in week one. Then I opened all of them, because they're actually readable.
The default Neovim setup is better than the one I spent two years tuning. Slightly annoyed, mostly grateful.
My son's hand-me-down ThinkPad from 2011 runs Minecraft at a steady 60 now. He thinks I'm a wizard. I'm not correcting him.
Tatami is made by a few hundred people in their spare time. There's room for you.
A plugin is a folder with a manifest and a script. Your agent already knows the format, so the first one takes an afternoon.
A theme is sixteen colors and a wallpaper. The best community themes ship in the next release, credited to you.
Pick a café, post a date, bring a laptop. We send stickers and a slide deck for first-timers.
One short email when a new version ships, with what changed and what to try first. Nothing else.
The things people ask before they switch. Still curious? The community answers fast.
Yes. Tatami is free and open source, and it always will be. There is no paid edition and no account to create.
Arch Linux and the Hyprland tiling compositor, with our own installer, defaults and update tooling on top. You get the full Arch package repositories and the AUR.
Yes. The installer can set up dual boot next to Windows, and on a Mac you can try Tatami in a VM first without touching your disk.
No. The agent is optional and stays off until you pick one on first boot. Everything works with plain shortcuts and text files.
Most Windows games on Steam run through Proton. Titles with strict anti-cheat depend on the publisher, so check before you switch.
Many run through Wine and Bottles. For Office and anything stubborn, Tatami can set up a Windows 11 VM with a shared clipboard and folder in a few clicks.
Run tatami update, or click the badge in the bar when one is ready. Every update takes a snapshot first, so you can roll back from the boot menu.