Hack your OS X desktop environment

Hydra is a lightweight window manager with a powerful API and an extremely small footprint.

Download from Releases page, unzip the downloaded file, and run the app.

Feel free to install the current pre-release (beta4). It's basically the version that's going to be released once we get the icon (see issue #1), since I haven't found any bugs yet and there are no other open issues. And if you run update.check(), you'll get notified when 1.0 is released. So go for it!

Hydra will look for ~/.hydra/init.lua and run it if it exists. But if you haven't written one yet, it will run a fallback config that gives you a menu bar icon that contains an option to open this sample config. You can paste that into your ~/.hydra/init.lua to get started with a really basic starter config.

The full documentation is linked under the "Resources" section below.

https://github.com/sdegutis/hydra/blob/master/Hydra/sample_config.lua

Here's a snippet:

-- show a helpful menu
menu.show(function()
    local updatetitles = {[true] = "Install Update", [false] = "Check for Update..."}
    local updatefns = {[true] = updates.install, [false] = checkforupdates}
    local hasupdate = (updates.newversion ~= nil)

    return {
      {title = "Reload Config", fn = hydra.reload},
      {title = "-"},
      {title = "About", fn = hydra.showabout},
      {title = updatetitles[hasupdate], fn = updatefns[hasupdate]},
      {title = "Quit Hydra", fn = os.exit},
    }
end)

-- move the window to the right a bit, and make it a little shorter
hotkey.new({"cmd", "ctrl", "alt"}, "J", function()
    local win = window.focusedwindow()
    local frame = win:frame()
    frame.x = frame.x + 10
    frame.h = frame.h - 10
    win:setframe(frame)
end):enable()

Some brief examples of my own config:

Description	Animated Screenshot
Using hotkeys to move and resize a window along a grid
Using a hotkey to open Dictionary.app and show an alert
Using the built-in REPL

First and foremost, Hydra must be stable. It should never crash. You should only ever have to launch it once, and it should stay running into you quit it (or your compute restarts). No exceptions to this.

Secondly, Hydra must be lightweight. It should never do anything that drains your computer's battery. It should never poll for anything. And it should practically never use more than 10 MB of memory.

Thirdly, its API should be completely transparent. There should be no surprises in how it's behaving, or what's being executed and when. It should be fully predictable.

Finally, the API must not be bloated. Nothing should be put into it except what's impossible or impractical to do in pure Lua, and what's extremely common and likely to be used in everyone's configs.

I've worked hard to make Hydra useful and easy to use. I've also released it with a liberal open source license, so that you can do with it as you please. So, instead of charging for licenses, I'm asking for donations. If you find it helpful, I encourage you to donate what you believe would have been a fair price for a license:

Donate via PayPal

Released under MIT license.

Copyright (c) 2013 Steven Degutis

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.