Hammerspoon – Lua-based powerful tool automation of macOS (hammerspoon.org)

I'm getting melancholic vibes of AutoHotKey reading the docs, which was arguably my first entry into professional programming. Knowing nothing about coding, I built a service desk automation back then — with (network file-) shared hotkeys and a real GUI, all in one single file... good times.

Anyway, ever since switching to MacOS more than a decade ago, I've always been searching for an AHK analog for those simple keystroke automations, text-based, with just enough of a glue language to hold it all together — Automator never quite cut it for me, after wielding the full power of AHK, it always felt too limited, rigid and clicky-colory.

Even though I don't have immediate use cases for it anymore, it makes me very happy that I know where to go back now!

My MacOS automation is now my QMK keyboard calling Alfred workflows; I use Yabai for window management.

I admire Lua, but ran into some sharp edges learning to program in it. Still, one can get up to speed quickly if one knows other scripting languages.

Hammerspoon window management was deathly slow. Yabai is close to instantaneous.

It’s easy to use and has great docs. Lua is fun to write. HS is a really nice project.

Here are the top ways I'm using it right now:

1) Hide/show apps similar to how iTerm lets you bind a hotkey to hide/show a terminal. I've got ctrl+space set to Vimcal, alt+space set to midnight.app (a time tracker I'm building), and ctrl+alt+space set to Things.

2) Start/stop playing my work playlist of lofi hiphop. I got tired of the friction around opening Spotify, going into my work playlist, hitting play, waiting several moments for the playlist to load, etc, so I downloaded a bunch of mp3s from YouTube and put them in ~/Music/work/. Now my work music is a single keyboard shortcut (semicolon+m) and a few miliseconds away.

3) Set up screen recording. There are a few things that need to happen before I start a screen recording (opening CamHead.app, setting my screen resolution, and showing the dock at a certain height so I can later crop the video to 16:9) and I have it all bound to a single hotkey (semicolon+r). I've got another hotkey set up to unset it (semicolon+e).

4) You may have noticed I'm using keyboard shortcuts with semicolon as a modifier key. That's done with Hammerspoon too! I've got an extra layer of hotkeys available to me to set up whatever else I can think of in the future. The code I wrote to use semicolon like this sometimes breaks if I try to type too many actual semicolons in a row but I usually rely on JS Beautify to add those for me.

- Mute my computer when I put it to sleep or when I change wifi networks

- Hyper key

- Mail.app menubar indicator

- Spotify menubar current song

- Shortcut to move mouse cursor to another monitor

- Window switcher that only lists apps in the current workspace

As a result, it's possible that something broke which we didn't find in our internal testing. Please file GitHub issues :)

Happy Christmas y'all!

- https://taoofmac.com/space/apps/window_managers

Translate (Requires Google Translate API key) https://github.com/pasiaj/Translate-for-Hammerspoon

Autocorrect: https://github.com/nathancahill/Anycomplete

    local cmdShift = {'cmd', 'shift'}

    hs.hotkey.bind(cmdShift, 'm', function()
      local app = hs.application.frontmostApplication()

      for _, window in pairs(app:allWindows()) do
        window:minimize()
      end
    end)

    hs.hotkey.bind(cmdShift, 'u', function()
      local app = hs.application.frontmostApplication()

      for _, window in pairs(app:allWindows()) do
        window:unminimize()
      end
    end)

I feel Hammerspoon's Lua is to macOS what elisp is to Emacs. You can use it to glue all sorts of wonderful things.

I wrote a bit about it here: https://xenodium.com/emacs-utilities-for-your-os (building my own Alfred/Quicksilver-like experience) and https://xenodium.com/cycling-window-layouts-via-hammerspoon (cycle through my preferred window layouts).

edit: typos

It shows off a tiny bit of what you can do with Hammerspoon:

  - window and app management
    - keyboard shortcuts for common apps (eg. hyper+T for text editor, hyper+B for browser, hyper+S for shell)
    - if you can code a tiny bit of Lua there's no need for apps like Spectacle, Rectangle, Moom, etc. because it's easy to position apps wherever you want. eg. hyper+L arranges my browser+editor+terminal in a standard layout, and I have other shortcuts to set apps to halves or thirds of the screen, or to another monitor.
  - fuzzy-find popups (like Alfred/fzf) are built-in. I use it to choose audio input/output.
  - a replacement for Caffeine (menubar icon to keep computer from going to sleep)

At least a few years ago, OS X's window management when plugging/unplugging external monitors was pretty bad.

Thanks to Hammerspoon, I don't have to think about it at all - I plug in monitors when I want to and all my windows resize and move themselves based on rules I defined.

It means stepping away from my desk or coming back to it is a no-brainer.

Maybe it's not needed these days, but it sure was a lifesaver back when I first adopted it.

My config, if people are interested:

https://github.com/NateEag/dotfiles/blob/master/src/.hammers...

  local function insertDB(db, linkval, value)
    local url = tostring(linkVal)
    local categ = tostring(value)
  db:exec[=[
           INSERT INTO bookmarks VALUES (NULL,`url`,`categ`) 
    ]=]
   end


  hs.hotkey.bind({"alt", "ctrl"}, "S", function()
    db = hs.sqlite3.open('/dropbox/user/bookmarks.db')
    local insert_stmt = assert( db:prepare("INSERT INTO 
  bookmarks VALUES (NULL, ?, ?)") )

  local url = hs.pasteboard.getContents()

  local tag, value = hs.dialog.textPrompt(url, "Please enter 
  category:");

  if tag == 'OK' then
  insert_stmt:bind_values(url, value)
  insert_stmt:step()
  insert_stmt:reset()
  -- insertDB(db, linkVal, value) 
 end