Live data from Hacker News

Hydra: A lightweight OS X window manager with a powerful API

github.com

11–20 of 157 posts

Re: Hydra: A lightweight OS X window manager with a powerful API

#12

This looks great, but my favourite thing might be the Principles section: > Hydra must be stable. It should never crash > Hydra must be lightweight... never use more than 10 MB of memory > API should be completely transparent > API must not be bloated I think these principles should be the standard to which we all hold our software. Looking forward to testing this out! Edit to say: it would be really great to see som…

Can you give an example of the kinds of samples you would like to see, and where you would look for them? (I presume under the Examples section on the README page?) That will help me know what to put there.

Re: Hydra: A lightweight OS X window manager with a powerful API

#13
post #7

This looks great. Will try it out. It has always surprised me how OS X has such a poor window placement story given how much emphasis apple seems to place on User Experience.

It doesn't shock me. Apple is all about the UE, but isn't at all about User Choice. Apple would prefer to tell you where the windows are best positioned for optimal usage rather than letting you tell them.

Plus for the majority of average users they'll never need side by side windows anyway, that is a "power user" feature (like multiple desktops, or similar).

Re: Hydra: A lightweight OS X window manager with a powerful API

#15
post #7

This looks great. Will try it out. It has always surprised me how OS X has such a poor window placement story given how much emphasis apple seems to place on User Experience.

I don't there is anything too surprising about this. "User Experience" isn't something you can measure on a single line, there are different aspects to it. I'm not an expert but I think the following are some of the things that users can appreciate:

1. That things work smoothly.

2. That things look pretty.

3. That it's easy to figure out what a program does when you first use it.

4. That it's possible to control the program efficiently, i.e., that you can quickly activate a program's different functions.

5. That a program is powerful, in that it enables you to customize it to work exactly as you need and automate it's use.

I've heard people claim Apple focuses on 1-3, I've never heard people say Apple focuses on 4 and 5. For windows placement in particular, Mac OS (as practically all window managers) has a method that covers 1-3: move and resize with the mouse.

Re: Hydra: A lightweight OS X window manager with a powerful API

#17
Looks awesome.

But I have some issues I can't seem to resolve - I saved the sample config in the specified path (it should be correct since on reload the app says "Hydra sample config loaded"), but I can't open the repl (Hydra Error: "Attempt to call a nil value"). And using the Cmd+Ctrl+Alt+J doesn't make the window shorter, only moves it to the right (going out of the screen).

I am sure this is just a beta release hiccup.

Re: Hydra: A lightweight OS X window manager with a powerful API

#19

This looks great, but my favourite thing might be the Principles section: > Hydra must be stable. It should never crash > Hydra must be lightweight... never use more than 10 MB of memory > API should be completely transparent > API must not be bloated I think these principles should be the standard to which we all hold our software. Looking forward to testing this out! Edit to say: it would be really great to see som…

Can you give an example of the kinds of samples you would like to see, and where you would look for them? (I presume under the Examples section on the README page?) That will help me know what to put there.

You have a link to your own config and some screenshots of it in action, maybe it would be good to pull out the relevant sections of your config so people can replicate what they see in the screenshots?

Re: Hydra: A lightweight OS X window manager with a powerful API

#20
I miss my days on Ubuntu with i3 tiling window manager. I currently use an app called Amethyst[1] but find it to be a bit buggy at times and just doesn't live up to i3 or awesome. I wonder if hydra can be used as a launch point to create a better tiling window manager for OSX. I'm not familiar with the APIs that OSX exposes, if any, to do things like window management but it would be awesome to see some more control over workspaces and not just the windows within a workspace.

[1] https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst

Post reply on HN