Any nice, stable ways to keep a window 'Always on top' on the Mac?

I am looking for a stable way to keep any window 'always on top' on OSX.

Afloat, an app that does that requires SIMBL/easySIMBL, which it seems is not very stable.

Are there any better solutions? It's actually surprising that there is no native way to implement this.

Solution 1:

I'll note that the iOS Simulator has the option Stay On Top (formerly called Stay in Front). Extremely useful functionality, and proves that there are Apple-supported and sanctioned ways to achieve this behavior.

Might be worth opening a radar, especially for adding to Terminal.

You can duplicate my radar:

Bug ID 27430873: Add "Stay in Front" option to Terminal windows.

Apple's Activity Monitor app similarly has the option Keep CPU Windows on Top that floats the small CPU graphs on top of all other apps' windows:

Solution 2:

If you are looking to do this just for a say an internet browser window you could look at the open source Helium app. It's free, and you can also download the source and compile your own version if you want.

It's basically an internet browser that always floats above all other windows.

EDIT:

There's also a newer app from the Apple Mac App Store called Fluid Browser that will do this same thing. It does cost a couple of $s, but it works excellently and has a few more features than Helium (as of 7/6/2016). So you now have two different apps to choose from.

Solution 3:

If you're looking to watch video while you browse or use other applications, you can use the Picture-in-Picture Extension (by Google) for Chrome.