Hammerspoon

https://github.com/Hammerspoon/hammerspoon

by tosh • 4 months ago

355 149 4 months ago

golem143• 4 months ago

Has anyone worked on making a config replicating aerospace?

Hammerspoon seems like a superset and it’s probably better to just have one, instead of two tools warring about who gets the keypresses?

hirvi745• 4 months ago

What features are you trying to replicate from Aerospace?

golem143• 4 months ago

Well, a tiling window and workspace manager. But as I am typing this, I’m realizing they hammerspoon can probably do some of the window placement, but maybe not handling workspaces and global state.

I was hoping I could be lazy and ask, and a not-lazy person could give a ready made answer :)

pjm3313• 4 months ago

here is my entire config

    hs.hotkey.bind({"ctrl"}, "D", function()
      hs.grid.show()
    end)

i've tried all of the other fancy window managers and for me nothing has ever beat the ease of use of just

(1) ctrl-d to see the grid, (2) type the letter where you want the top left corner of your window to be, (3) type the letter where you want the bottom right corner to be

window resized

stackghost• 4 months ago

Not that I insert EOFs very often, but does that conflict with CTRL+D in the terminal?

xyzzy_plugh• 4 months ago

I use EOF all the time to end terminal sessions.

pjm3313• 4 months ago

yeah the CTRL+D definitely gives me problems from time to time but thus far i have been too lazy to fix it

theshrike792• 4 months ago

Make caps lock a hyperkey (shift+ctrl+option+cmd) and use that for non-overlapping shortcuts

elAhmo• 4 months ago

This is amazing! I have a slightly more elaborate setup that allows me to resize from one or another side, similar to what Apple added recently but with more flexibility, but this is super interesting, thanks for sharing!

matthewmc3• 4 months ago

Wow... that's... incredible. I've used Hammerspoon forever and never knew that existed.

Just messing around I found you can extend the grid size with `hs.grid.setGrid('4x4')`, which you also may then want to shrink the text size with `hs.grid.ui.textSize = 30`, and finally if you use an alternative keyboard layout (eg: Colemak), you can set the grid to use it with `hs.grid.HINTS`. They really thought of everything with this feature.

hackerthemonkey• 4 months ago

This is amazing. Thanks for sharing. Did you ever look into capturing the states of where all the windows are once you are done with resizing them? So as to restore them later back into position if they ever get out of alignment ?

Thinking of the usecase where every task or a project deserves a certain arrangement of windows and it would be good to summon them into existence as and when needed?

pjm3313• 4 months ago

Im sure that’s possible but my own working style is too chaotic for saving workspaces like that haha

john-tells-all• 4 months ago

I'd love to have a global "toggle Teams mute" button.

hirvi745• 4 months ago

What do you mean? Like muting the entire application so no sound comes from Teams or muting yourself while on a call? For the latter, I thought 'Option + Space' worked (or used to)?

reddit_clone• 4 months ago

Cmd+Shift+m mutes/un-mutes your Mic when focus is on teams window.

I think GP is asking about a global (from any application) mute/unmute teams Mic. I have wished for one for ever.

roxolotl• 4 months ago

```

hs.loadSpoon("MicMute")

binding = { toggle = { {"ctrl", "alt"}, "m" } }

spoon.MicMute:bindHotkeys(binding)

```

You'll have to add the MicMute spoon which just mean downloading the zip here, unzipping, and opening the .spoon. https://www.hammerspoon.org/Spoons/MicMute.html

jjmiv• 4 months ago

is there a particular reason this was shared?

otherwise I'm slowly working on a Spoon that figures out if there is an active meeting in Zoom, Teams, Huddle, Google Meet and will allow for muting, video enable/disable and screen sharing etc

al_borland2• 4 months ago

My guess is someone just found it. When I was moving to macOS for my work laptop, I was looking for something to replace AutoHotKey. It took me a long time and a lot of digging to actually find HammerSpoon.

rolymath• 4 months ago

Is paperwm jittery for everyone?

kelvie• 4 months ago

It's really jittery for me and freezes fairly often on my work macbook. I even have a Sol script to restart hammerspoon.

Still wouldn't work without it though (I run Niri at home)

trjordan• 4 months ago

I utterly love Hammerspoon.

It's fun to combine with qmk [0], which gives you a bunch more options for hotkeys on your keyboard via layers. I've ended up with a layer where half the keyboard is Hammerspoon shortcuts directly to apps (e.g. go to Slack, to Chrome, etc.) and half of it is in-app shortcuts (like putting cmd-number on the home row, for directly addressing chrome tabs).

Between this and one of the tiling window manager-adjacent tools (I use Sizeup), I can do all my OS-level navigation directly. "Oh I want to go to Slack and go to this DM" is a few keystrokes away, and not dependent on what else I was doing.

[0] https://qmk.fm/

henrebotha2• 4 months ago

My QMK Tmux "layer" is still one of my favourite customisations. Prepends Ctrl-B to everything I type.

incanus777• 4 months ago

Hammerspoon is the glue that holds my Mac together. For a starter list of things to do with this app, a partial list of the things that I'm using it for:

  - Dumping all open Safari tabs to an Obsidian doc
  - Adding 'hyper' (Ctrl-Opt-Cmd) keybinds to pop a new window for:
    - Safari
    - Finder
    - Terminal / Ghostty
    - VS Code
    - Notes
    - Editing Hammerspoon/AeroSpace/Sketchybar config
    - Reloading Hammerspoon config
    - Reloading Sketchybar
    - Quitting all Dock apps except Finder
    - Screen lock
    - System sleep
    - Opening front Finder folder in VS Code
    - Opening front Safari URL on Archive.today
    - Showing front Safari window tab count
    - Showing front app bundle ID
    - Posting notification about current Music track
    - Controlling my Logi Litra light (various color temps/brightnesses)
    - Starting/stopping a client work timer
  - Tying it to AeroSpace for:
    - Pushing a window to another monitor
    - Performing a two-up window layout
    - Swapping those two windows
    - Closing all other workspace windows
    - Gathering all windows to first workspace
  - Ensuring some background apps stay running if they crash
  - Prompting to unmount disk images if trashed
  - Binding into Skim to jump to specific sections of spec PDFs using terse Markdown URLs

piskov3• 4 months ago

Keyboard stuff is better handled with Karabiner elements

dbalatero5• 4 months ago

Karabiner can _create_ new keys like hyper, but you _bind_ them with Hammerspoon.

joemi2• 4 months ago

- Dumping all open Safari tabs to an Obsidian doc

I'd love to do this too. Would you mind sharing how you do it? Or is it trivially easy and not worth explaining? (I haven't looked too deeply into HS yet.)

michaelteter• 4 months ago

I have no idea how that person is doing it, but I suspect it could be using osascript. Here's how I do it from my homegrown Go bookmark tool:

  const fetchTabsScript = `
  tell application "Brave Browser"
      set output to ""
      repeat with w in windows
          repeat with t in tabs of w
              set output to output & (URL of t) & "|||" & (title of t) & "\n"
          end repeat
      end repeat
      return output
  end tell
  `  
  
  func GetOpenTabs() ([]Tab, error) {
   cmd := exec.Command("osascript", "-e", fetchTabsScript)
   output, err := cmd.Output()
    // ...
  }

incanus777• 4 months ago

It's not trivial, but roughly: use AppleScript/osascript to get the URLs, but mostly pass them to a ~50 line Bash script which:

  - Brings in the date path components for the dumped-to folder
  - Makes a hash of the URL for an Obsidian doc (each tab gets their own doc)
  - Uses Chrome command line (--headless --disable-gpu --dump-dom) to save a snapshot of the page contents
  - Uses it again with --screenshot to make a thumbnail
  - Create an Obsidian doc from a template
  - If it's a single tab dump, pass -o to the script, which opens it in Obsidian for review

Lastly, I use the relatively-new Bases feature in Obsidian to make a nice "cards" view of the docs with their thumbnails.

I'm hoping to clean it up at some point and maybe release it, but it's one of those classic one-shot systems that just works for me for now.

zimpenfish7• 4 months ago

I pretty much only use it for two (related) things these days:

- check the list of open Teams windows; if there's a non-standard one, assume I'm in a meeting and webhook to HomeAssistant to select the "active"[2] preset on my meeting light[0].

- download my work ical[1] and, if there's a pending meeting (<~15m), webhook-HASS for the "pending" present on the meeting light.

[0] Just a short strip of WS2812B connected to an ESP32 running WLED.

[1] Originally this was a simple HTTP to my shared link on outlook.com but then they started requiring authentication (because that's exactly what you want on a SHARED link, you gufftarts); had a look at the Azure SDK and ... bag of milky spanners that is; ended up having to import my work ical into Apple Calendar and then use the ical link for that in Hammerspoon. Oh how we laughed. Especially when I realised it only has about 40% of the actual meetings because somehow "my calendar" is actually 4 or 5 bastardised conglomerations of pain and the ical for "my calendar" is actually just for one of those. AND NOT THE USEFUL ONE EITHER.

[2] There's various - "camera" for "the one meeting I'm forced to have my camera on", "active" is "I probably have to talk", "passive" is "I'm not going to be talking", and "silent" for things like company presentations where it's just watching a boring Powerpoint over Teams.

incanus777• 4 months ago

This is a great integration!

user45774467644• 4 months ago

I do something simular. I use the window titles to track the call lenghth and the icon in the menubar to track my teamsstatus. Works flawless.

wlonkly3• 4 months ago

Tossing a couple things out mostly for the people getting ideas from these threads:

I've done something similar, but using the webcam watcher to hook on the webcam being enabled for any reason -- that way when I have that one external meeting on Google Meet or whatever the light still works.

(I also found it useful to have Hammerspoon flip a virtual switch in, well, Hubitat for me, and then automation based on that virtual switch, rather than triggering the light directly. Lets me hang other things off of that virtual switch instead of putting it in Hammerspoon.)

elcomet• 4 months ago

Could you share your config?

incanus777• 4 months ago

It's fairly sprawling right now — a small init.lua that sources four other files, most over 100 LOC. What are you most interested in?

MomsAVoxell4• 4 months ago

Impressive ‘spooning!

I use it for one thing only, as a window manager, and for that purpose it has made MacOS eminently more usable for me.

oofbey• 4 months ago

Thanks for the examples. I was struggling to come up with ideas of how I’d use this.

mwagstaff• 4 months ago

Can't live without Hammerspoon on Mac.

Can't live without AutoHotkey on Windows.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to both!

hirvi745• 4 months ago

I have fond memories of this app. However, after many years, I have moved on. I am in the process of writing my own replacement for some of the various use cases that Hammerspoon once provided me. Though, Hammerspoon will always be a source of great inspiration.

weitzj• 4 months ago

I love hammerspoon. That's it :D

It's lua, so you can get creative with https://fennel-lang.org/

hmokiguess• 4 months ago

what's your favourite spoon?

zdw• 4 months ago

I fake a tiling window manager on Mac with Hammerspoon, resizing to fit in specific corners/sizes:

     -- resize based on ratios
    function ratioResize(xr, yr, wr, hr)
      return function ()
        local win = hs.window.focusedWindow()
        win:moveToUnit({x=xr,y=yr,w=wr,h=hr})
      end
    end

    -- 4 corners, different sizes
    hs.hotkey.bind({"cmd", "ctrl"}, "w", ratioResize(0,     0, 2/5, 2/3))
    hs.hotkey.bind({"cmd", "ctrl"}, "e", ratioResize(2/5,   0, 3/5, 2/3))
    hs.hotkey.bind({"cmd", "ctrl"}, "s", ratioResize(0,   2/3, 2/5, 1/3))
    hs.hotkey.bind({"cmd", "ctrl"}, "d", ratioResize(2/5, 2/3, 3/5, 1/3))

And to throw windows to other monitors:

    -- send to next screen
    hs.hotkey.bind({"cmd", "ctrl"}, ";", function()
      local win = hs.window.focusedWindow()
      local screen = win:screen()
      local next_screen = screen:next()

      win:moveToScreen(next_screen)
    end)

comboy• 4 months ago

I highly recommend Aerospace[1], went through a few approaches, I cared about not completely compromising security either, it works really well if you come from something like i3

1. https://github.com/nikitabobko/AeroSpace

idle_zealot• 4 months ago

Seconding this. I find MacOS unusable without it. I'll ask here because websearch is failing me: is there a way to fix the focus stealing that happens when you have multiple windows of an application on different displays? Specifically, say workspace 1 and 2 are on monitor Left, while 3 and 4 are on Right. Application A has a window on workspace 1, B has one window on 2 and another on 3, and C has a window on 4. Workspace 1 is active on display Left, workspace 4 is active on Right. If I switch to workspace 3 the following happens:

- the switch goes through, Left displays workspace 1, right displays 3 (desired state)

- Application B is focused, presumably because its window on 3 becomes active (also desired)

- Display Left switches to display workspace 2, presumably because it contains a window belonging to the newly focused application B? (I don't want this)

- the window of application B on workspace 2 steals focus from the one on workspace 3 (???)

jeberle• 4 months ago

I use it similarly, but I add spots for side x side as well as left, center, right. I only use Hammerspoon for this and a couple tiny things, but it's completely worth it for this alone. Use math to specify window sizes & location. Insanity.

  local mode = hs.screen.primaryScreen():currentMode()
  local mods = {"ctrl", "alt", "cmd"}  -- mash those keys
  
  -- regular app windows
  do
    local w   = 1094  -- no clip on GitHub, HN
    local h   = 1122  -- tallish
    local x_1 =    0                               -- left edge
    local x_2 = math.max(0, (mode.w - w - w) / 2)  -- left middle
    local x_3 =             (mode.w - w) / 2       -- middle
    local x_4 = math.min(mode.w - w, x_2 + w + 1)  -- right middle
    local x_5 =          mode.w - w                -- right edge
    local y   =   23  -- top of screen below menu bar
  
    hs.hotkey.bind(mods, "2", function() move_win(  0, y, mode.w, mode.h) end)  -- max
  
    hs.hotkey.bind(mods, "3", function() move_win(x_1, y, w, h) end)
    hs.hotkey.bind(mods, "4", function() move_win(x_2, y, w, h) end)
    hs.hotkey.bind(mods, "5", function() move_win(x_3, y, w, h) end)
    hs.hotkey.bind(mods, "6", function() move_win(x_4, y, w, h) end)
    hs.hotkey.bind(mods, "7", function() move_win(x_5, y, w, h) end)
  end
  
  function move_win(x, y, w, h)
    hs.window.focusedWindow():setFrame(hs.geometry.rect(x, y, w, h))
  end

piskov3• 4 months ago

Moom is really the best

apazzolini• 4 months ago

I like the miro windows manager plugin: https://github.com/miromannino/miro-windows-manager

It's nice to be able to iterate through the halves/thirds configurations for different cases.

ackfoobar• 4 months ago

https://github.com/peterklijn/hammerspoon-shiftit

I use ShiftIt (a lovely project, but dead) reimplemented in Hammerspoon. It is very comprehensive.

mortar• 4 months ago

I do this too, really happy with my setup - I use hyper+arrow keys to move windows around a monitor (split in thirds on 40”+ or halves on the built-in screen), or jump to another monitor, and hyper+enter to fullscreen. When you push against an edge in full screen it reduces the window size in stages, it all feels natural.

jmcguckin• 4 months ago

I use it to give me focus-follows-mouse and to have a large circle surrounding the mouse when i move it, to aid finding it.

juancn• 4 months ago

I use it to hide Zoom's screen sharing controls so they don't come back when pressing Esc:

    -- Hide Zoom's "share" windows so it doesn't come back on ESC keypress
    local zoomWindow = nil
    local originalFrame = nil
    
    hs.hotkey.bind({"cmd", "ctrl", "alt"}, "H", function()
      print("> trying to hide zoom")
      if not zoomWindow then
        print(">  looking for window")
        zoomWindow = hs.window.find("zoom share statusbar window")
      end
    
      if zoomWindow then
        print(">  found window")
        if originalFrame then
          print(">    restoring")
          zoomWindow:setFrame(originalFrame)
          originalFrame = nil
          zoomWindow = nil
        else
          print(">    hiding")
          originalFrame = zoomWindow:frame()
          local screen = zoomWindow:screen()
          local frame = zoomWindow:frame()
          frame.x = screen:frame().w + 99000
          frame.y = screen:frame().h + 99000
          zoomWindow:setFrame(frame)
        end
      else
        print(">  window not found")
      end
    end)

henrebotha2• 4 months ago

Oh my god, immediately worth installing just for this

overflowy• 4 months ago

I use this to remap app keys:

    local appHotkeys = {}

    local function remapAppHotkey(appName, fromMods, fromKey, toMods, toKey, delay)
        if not appHotkeys[appName] then
            appHotkeys[appName] = {}
        end
        local hotkey = hs.hotkey.new(fromMods, fromKey, function()
            hs.eventtap.keyStroke(toMods, toKey, delay or 0)
        end)
        table.insert(appHotkeys[appName], hotkey)
    end
    
    local appWatcher = hs.application.watcher.new(function(appName, eventType)
        local hotkeys = appHotkeys[appName]
        if not hotkeys then return end
        for _, hotkey in ipairs(hotkeys) do
            if eventType == hs.application.watcher.activated then
                hotkey:enable()
            elseif eventType == hs.application.watcher.deactivated then
                hotkey:disable()
            end
        end
    end)
    
    appWatcher:start()

    -- Remap app hotkeys
    remapAppHotkey("Finder", { "cmd" }, "q", { "cmd" }, "w", 0.5)
    ... etc ...

alexfortin• 4 months ago

I use it to enable/disable the wifi when I disconnec/connect the macbook to a specific usb hub with ethernet connection:

  local usbWatcher = hs.usb.watcher.new(function(device)
    if device.productName == "EMEET SmartCam C960" then
      if device.eventType == "added" then
        hs.execute("networksetup -setairportpower en0 off")
        hs.notify.new({title="Wi-Fi", informativeText="Disabled (USB device connected)"}):send()
      elseif device.eventType == "removed" then
        hs.execute("networksetup -setairportpower en0 on")
        hs.notify.new({title="Wi-Fi", informativeText="Re-enabled (USB device removed)"}):send()
      end
    end
  end)
  usbWatcher:start()

jmarcher• 4 months ago

That should not be required if the Ethernet adapter has a higher priority. That being said, you might different reason.

https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/mac-help/mchlp2711/mac

swiftcoder• 4 months ago

I always confuse "hammerspoon" and "rowhammer"

iLemming5• 4 months ago

So, the trivia behind the name is interesting. It all starts with a project called "Mjolnir" (Thor's Hammer). The original idea was for a lightweight automation engine with pluggable architecture. Someone wished to have "batteries included" version, the author said they're not interested in that direction, so the fork was born. What's meant to be a hard-fork, so really not a fork, but rather a "spoon", hence the name.

selectnull• 4 months ago

Love hammerspoon. I use it to map double CMD to swap between the terminal and the browser.

theshrike792• 4 months ago

I tried to find a proper window control tool for macOS for a while, tested Rectangle and Magnet and dunno how many.

Then I just figured out that I have Hammerspoon, it can control windows -> recreate one exactly how I like it. Been using it for a year now and it's 99% perfect. Some specific applications (coughFirefoxcough) sometimes get into a weird state that doesn't work, but I can live with that.

It can also pop all windows to a specific layout with a single shortcut by combining the active wifi + monitor setup to detect if I'm at home, at work, or working at home.

piskov3• 4 months ago

Moom works like a charm

regus• 4 months ago

How does this compare to AppleScript?

dbalatero5• 4 months ago

Insanely easier to use, way better programming language, a kitchen sink of macOS APIs, and you can still call out to AppleScript when you need it: https://www.hammerspoon.org/docs/hs.osascript.html#applescri...

cjbarber• 4 months ago

See also:

KeyboardMaestro

Automator and AppleScript

Raycast

ChrisArchitect• 4 months ago

https://www.hammerspoon.org/

Some previous discussion:

2021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29533495

2019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21801178

iLemming5• 4 months ago

Shameless plug/proud self-promotion - https://github.com/agzam/spacehammer "Spacemacs|Doom inspired Hammerspoon modal toolkit"

I can't even work on Mac without it. It let's you do stuff like "alt+spc a b" (apps -> browser) or "alt+spc m j/k" (media -> vol up/down), or edit just about any text of any app in your editor (Emacs atm) - with all the tools you have there - spellchecking, thesaurus, translation, LLMs, etc.

You can plug it to your favorite WM (I'm currently using Yabai) and do tons of other interesting things. Because it's all written in Fennel, one can develop things in a tight feedback loop with a connected REPL - e.g., I can ask Claude to inspect things in the running Slack app or Firefox and make interesting automations - all without ever leaving my editor.

jedbrooke• 4 months ago

"alt+cmd m j/k" (media -> vol up/down)

if only keyboards came with built in buttons for adjusting the volume… oh wait. Unless of course you are suffering on a touch bar mac, then I completely understand.

iLemming5• 4 months ago

It's not about "having" or "not having" keys for specific actions, it's all about freedom and feeling of control. When you take and apply the idea of modality, you quickly realize that you are no longer constrained with the number of combinations you can have or the type of keyboard you're using. Everything can be controlled by (mostly) using home-row keys - h/j/k/l - without having to memorize weird combinations of modifiers and keys - "was it Ctrl+Alt+Cmd F, or just Ctrl+Cmd F?"

alt+cmd (was a typo, I meant to say alt+space), which is configurable - I myself prefer using cmd+space. That opens the "main" modal, from where you can configure "conditional branching" - e.g. "m" - for "media", or "a" - for "apps", so with "alt+space m j/k" you can do volume up/down, while pressing h/l could be "previous/next song". Then, "alt+spc a b" activates the browser, and "alt+spc a t" - could be bind to activate "terminal", etc.

It only looks like you have to press more keys to achieve anything, in practice - you quickly develop muscle memory. Then switching between the apps, moving windows around and resizing them, controlling playback, etc. - it all gains incredible productivity without affecting the focus point. You don't need to keep moving your hand for the mouse, you don't need to memorize and deal with myriad of modifier-driven key combinations - you control precisely what you need, without ever having to contort your fingers to hold modifiers, without ever thinking "what should I bind this action to, all memoizable keys are already taken, I suppose I'll just bind it to this impossible combo with a key that has no semantic meaning for the thing..." With Spacehammer you can create mnemonically-handy actions e.g., "o f" for "Open in Finder", while in another context that may work as "Open in Firefox".

zimpenfish7• 4 months ago

if only keyboards came with built in buttons for adjusting the volume…

99% of my working day, my fingers are on or near alt/cmd/m/j/k (a nice easy position in the centre of the keyboard.)

They are not on or indeed anywhere even vaguely near fn+f10/f11/f12 (which are, in fact, diametrically opposite corners of the keyboard.)

jtokoph• 4 months ago

My external mechanical keyboard doesn’t have media keys.

gedy• 4 months ago

If you are on macOS but miss Paperwm or niri, etc this is a good compromise thanks to Hammerspoon: https://github.com/mogenson/PaperWM.spoon

ifh-hn• 4 months ago

It's this like Mac equivalent to autohotkey on windows?

msephton2• 4 months ago

Kinda, I'd say Hammerspoon can do more.

dbalatero5• 4 months ago

I have an unreleased pile of tutorial projects with Hammerspoon. I think not all chapters are finished, so I need to clean up and finish it at some point soon: https://learnhammerspoon.com

kcrwfrd_• 4 months ago

I despair at not being able to easily send a window to another space with a keyboard shortcut on macOS.

Yabai supports this perfectly (especially combined with instant, animation-free space switching) but it requires disabling system integrity protection--which is a non-starter on a work computer.

Aerospace solves it with their own spaces implementation.

I was able to put together a hammerspoon script that does the job decently enough for my purposes: https://gist.github.com/kcrwfrd/6f3dcaec0e08e0e77b2884588a34...

tcoff915• 4 months ago

Aerospace is the least bad option

dbalatero5• 4 months ago

Some stuff I've made in Hammerspoon you can use:

- Vim mode everywhere in macOS: https://github.com/dbalatero/VimMode.spoon

- Modifier keys + click/drag to resize or move windows: https://github.com/dbalatero/SkyRocket.spoon

- Show an overlay helper of all your keybinds when you hold modifier keys down: https://github.com/dbalatero/HyperKey.spoon

And my huge pile of random scripts/configs: https://github.com/dbalatero/nixpkgs/tree/main/home/modules/...

tcoff915• 4 months ago

I like kindaVim for vim mode everywhere in macOS

cmsj10• 4 months ago

Hammerspoon maintainer here - I'm enjoying reading all the comments, and hoping that everyone isn't going to be annoyed that I'm mostly working on a v2 atm, which switches from Lua to JavaScript :D

zimpenfish7• 4 months ago

a v2 atm, which switches from Lua to JavaScript :D

Presumably that'll be released in [checks calendar] 18 days?

themadsens• 4 months ago

Maybe not: https://www.reddit.com/r/hammerspoon/comments/1puln7j/110_re... https://github.com/cmsj/Hammerspoon2

pstuart• 4 months ago

I'm curious if the switch was for dev ergonomics or the mindshare of the languages?

cmsj10• 4 months ago

Mostly the former, but the latter is also attractive. Once I got the basic core working and a couple of modules implemented, I had Claude build me a script that extracts type information and method signatures, to automatically build a TypeScript definition file.

I have a feeling that letting people do what Hammerspoon can do, but in a TypeScript environment that they're much more likely to know, than Lua, will be huge for the project.

saagarjha2• 4 months ago

Hammerspoon is basically my only reason to write Lua, a language which I really like. I am sure JavaScript is a more pragmatic choice but I will be slightly saddened by it regardless.

cole_2• 4 months ago

Agreed, I never considered it a selling point but I did enjoy having an excuse to explore the language in Hammerspoon (and Neovim too).

al_borland2• 4 months ago

Will this lead to some synergy with AppleScript, which added JavaScript a few years ago?

cmsj10• 4 months ago

Not really any more or less than in v1 - which is to say that it's possible to execute those scripts from Hammerspoon, but there's no rich bridging between them.

cole_2• 4 months ago

Thank you for your work on Hammerspoon! I’ve been using it for years.

Would you mind elaborating on your vision for v2? Was there a certain limitation in the previous architecture that you’re trying to avoid this time around? Was there something in particular that drew you to choosing JavaScript for this version?

cmsj10• 4 months ago

The limitation is entirely on the developer side - for years now there have only really been three of us working on Hammerspoon with any regularity, and that has been significantly dwindling down to mostly just me and Chris Hocking.

Honestly, in 2026, I do not want to be maintaining a 100k line Objective C program.

So, my current experimentation with a v2 is to see how easily I can catch up with where v1 is, just using Swift and JavaScriptCore.

There are lots of things about the Lua APIs that I don't like, and I'm addressing some of those as I go, but I'm currently in a phase where I'm targeting parity with everything I need for my v1 config, at which point I can cut over to running v2 and then see how things are looking and what can be refined/reworked.

eviks• 4 months ago

Have you though of some more modern language agnostic solution like wasm plugins users could write in anything, with the help of typed languages if they like? Or is that not feasible for a scripting project like this?

cmsj10• 4 months ago

I expect that is possible, but the specific choice of JavaScript is because Apple ships a framework that bridges types very nicely between native and JS. It's used by WebKit, so it works really well and is very unlikely to disappear.

That means the core of Hammerspoon goes from being incredibly complicated, to really just a protocol conformance.

pazimzadeh• 4 months ago

I love Hammerspoon!! here's my one handed shortcuts for window control across multiple monitors: https://gist.github.com/pazimzadeh/b1c70f5f205d0b63264e7c021...

What will v2 enable??

cmsj10• 4 months ago

Really there's very little that v2 might do, that v1 couldn't. This is almost all about me not wanting to maintain a big pile of Objective C and Lua anymore. I want to be working in Swift, and rather than maintain our own type bridging to/from Lua, we can get that for free from Apple's JavaScriptCore framework.

Beyond my enjoyment/productivity on the developer side though, I think v2 will be a big boost to user enjoyment/productivity, mostly because they'll be able to get much nicer IDE integrations for their config file, and be able to do things like write their config in TypeScript.

dayson• 4 months ago

Can't wait for the JS switch! Personally, it's having to figure out Lua is what's kept me away from it... :)

n8henrie• 4 months ago

Lua in HS is what motivated me to finally learn a lisp (Fennel).

MomsAVoxell4• 4 months ago

What’s so hard to figure out about Lua if you already know JS?

Lua is a better JS.

/ducks

cmsj10• 4 months ago

Would it then interest you to know that the build process for v2 ships a hammerspoon.d.ts with the app? :)

MomsAVoxell4• 4 months ago

Hammerspoon maintainer ..

Yay! :D

.. enjoying ..

Lua to JavaScript

Well, I have been a long user of Hammerspoon, and Lua, so thanks for the great app, it made a difference for me for a long time .. would be happy to hear why, but don’t feel obliged, the switch to JS over Lua, but anyway, thanks again!

cmsj10• 4 months ago

The simple answer is not having to maintain a really complicated language bridge anymore.

The more complex answer is that Hammerspoon is currently about 100k lines of Objective C, and none of us really want to work on it anymore when Swift is the much nicer place to be doing macOS development.

Technically we could slowly convert in-place from ObjC to Swift, but there will always be a need for "LuaSkin", the bridging code we've accumulated over the last 13+ years, and rewriting that in Swift would be significantly complicated.

JavaScript, however, is already bridged for us because WebKit needs it.

kbd2• 4 months ago

Hmm I already avoid Lua by writing in Fennel, I’ll probably avoid the JS by writing… what Lisp compiles to JS, ClojureScript?

iLemming5• 4 months ago

Cljs setup for this case probably would require a bit of scaffolding. While using https://github.com/squint-cljs/squint perhaps would be pretty straightforward. Albeit you're gonna lose the type-safety guarantees - Clojure is strongly typed, and Clojurescript sometimes emits safer code than Typescript does (TS removes all the type-related data from the compiled .js code, while Cljs keeps the runtime checks in place). Squint afaik is much closer to Javascript in that respect.

jiehong• 4 months ago

Do you plan to keep v1 for a while or to provide a way to translate all the current spoons for v2?

cmsj10• 4 months ago

v1 won't stop working until Apple breaks something it relies on, and there may be interested community people who step up to take over maintenance.

homakov2• 4 months ago

why not both? JS is a pragmatic choice 100x more devs understand though.

iLemming5• 4 months ago

100x more devs understand though

Things programmers believe. It's interesting how some knowledge fundamentally assumed by default. For whatever reasons, the notion is widespread. You're a programmer? Therefore you must know JS, SQL, Bash and Python. In practice, what I've found after decades working with various teams - most programmers have pretty inadequate knowledge of any of these things.

saagarjha2• 4 months ago

Hammerspoon is one of the first apps I install on my Mac. Not having it makes it more or less broken to me.

rco8786• 4 months ago

Love Hammerspoon

nxobject• 4 months ago

Thank you so much for doing what Apple's neglected to do for many years! The way they let AppleScript/JXA rot was criminal.

fudged71• 4 months ago

I recently set up Hammerspoon to surveil my own computer usage actions (active tab/window, typing state, scrolling) to have a next-action predictor. It shows the predicted next action at the top of the screen but I was thinking of using it to improve voice command accuracy.

msephton2• 4 months ago

I use it to: - implement a keyboard based window manager - arrange/quit/launch some things based on whether my MBP is docked or not - resize and reposition certain windows that don't remember their own size and position - certain other hotkeys - probably stuff I forgot and rely on!

I'll be sad when it moves from Lua to JavaScript, but I guess that's better than moving to Tcl.

tcoff915• 4 months ago

I really like the Label feature. I use it to put labels on the screen in my different aerospace workspaces so I can keep track of which project I’m working on. With agents working in parallel this is really useful.

smasher164• 4 months ago

One of the reasons I left macos was that automation via Automator and Applescript was inconsistent and unsupported in many contexts. Well that and the locking down of app distribution and sandboxing. However, the positive reception to Hammerspoon is making me consider trying it again.

abhikul0• 4 months ago

Coming from windows to macos, I(i think i used perplexity :P) created a spoon for switching between open windows with 4 finger swipe[0]. Swiping left/right switches between windows, swiping down minimizes all visible windows, swiping up restores them(one by one). Created this repo to backup my config with an llm documenting it.

It uses a swipe gesture detection spoon I found after searching for something similar[1].

[0] https://github.com/abhikul0/hammerspoonConfig

[1] https://github.com/mogenson/Swipe.spoon

xendipity• 4 months ago

Excited to see this here! Only yesterday I used it to create an interactive native-like notification my coding agents use to ping me when they push a PR. I had tried a few different libraries over the past month but only hs had the ability to render custom panes over maximized windows.

Will be using it for more automation tools moving forward.

krick• 4 months ago

Is there something for Xfce?

robsalasco• 4 months ago

I use https://github.com/miromannino/miro-windows-manager for ages!

ljosifov• 4 months ago

Glad to see other people using it. Saved my life, was going crazy click-clicking to nab the right window. Now Cmd-1..9 brings to focus a window of my chosen application. (Chrome) In case it helps someone else, myself and Codex iterating over time https://github.com/ljubomirj/dotfiles/blob/main/.hammerspoon.... Cmd-1..9 switches over focuses to a particular window, Cmd-0 presents an (ugly; but suffices) dialog box to select the window with arrows (of the App of interest - Chrome for me atm) to switch to. But more important - to see what window what Window name is recalled by the particular Cmd-1..9 shortcut. Option-arrows shuffle window-to-key ordering. I right-click-Name Window my windows. Think back now - on restart they may even be preserved?? Don't recall re/naming them manually recently. (possible I've forgotten though)

radku• 4 months ago

Hammerspoon helped me have a F12 shortcut for Ghostty (the only feature I missed from guake on mac)! I love it

hibbelig• 4 months ago

I used to be a fan of tiling window managers, but I found out that I tend to use fairly visually heavy apps on a Mac. By this I mean apps that need quite a bit of screen real estate to show everything that needs to be shown:

The mail program has a folder tree on the left, the list of messages in the center, and the current message on the right. The IDE has all these tool windows that need showing, in addition to the actual editor. Websites also like it if the window size is a bit more.

Back when I was using Emacs and xterm, mainly, it was nice to show Emacs in the left half and then two xterms on the right.

So instead of tiling, I've come to realize that I only need a couple of window positions and sizes: Mail program and IDE are full screen. The browser occupies 70% width and height, in the top right corner, and the terminal is in the bottom left corner, 200 columns by 44 rows or so. (Lazygit works better if the terminal is a bit larger.) The chat program is full height, 60% width, left edge.

In this way, while the IDE is building or running tests, I can summon the web browser and still see at the bottom and on the left what is the progress of build or test. Also, when I use the software through the browser, I can see a couple of lines of log messages, which is enough to tell me whether to switch.

So I'm now happy with hotkeys in Hammerspoon that reposition and resize the current window to one of these presets, and to jump to a specific app with a keypress. I use a modal for this.

I dig the idea of having multi-level modals, somehow this idea never occurred to me.

Alifatisk• 4 months ago

The title has space for more description, maybe add "macOS desktop automation with Lua"?

reactordev• 4 months ago

This is more powerful than Mac’s own Automator tool, Lua is an interesting choice. Mac Automator used to only support AppleScript but now it supports JavaScriptCore from WebKit so you can run JavaScript with Mac Automator. This is what I do.

I’ll have a hell of a time rewriting everything into Lua when I have soooo many node packages I leverage.

wlonkly3• 4 months ago

Good news for you -- Hammerspoon v2 is going to use Javascript instead of Lua.

tomduncalf• 4 months ago

As chance would have it, I just tried this for the first time as I wanted to bind a keyboard shortcut to an option from a menu bar app which doesn’t support keybinding. ChatGPT wrote a script which uses AppleScript to do it. Really anwesome, and excited to find more cool things to do with it!

homakov2• 4 months ago

I vibecoded a local whisper replacement (free version of superwhisper/mac whisper basically) with claude and hammerspoon: https://github.com/xlnfinance/xln/blob/main/ai/install-voice...

cmd+, and it transcribes on release.

socalgal2• 4 months ago

This might be a dumb quesiton but ... do you think AppleScript was a mistake on Apple's part? My understanding is MacOS has had automation via AppleScript forever, but everytime I've used it the syntax is inscrutable. It feels like if they had chosen Python or JavaScript or Lua we'd see much more automation over the last 20+ years. Is Hammerspoon filling that gap?

wlonkly3• 4 months ago

AppleScript predates Javascript by two years, but by even more than that in terms of usability. It was definitely designed for "non-programmers", the people buying Macs in the System 7 days.

But modern MacOS is automatable using Javascript in Script Editor, so they're catching up.

Hammerspoon

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