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

#1

Post by LaSombra » Thu, Jul 03, 2014, 11:54 AM UTC

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

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

#2

Post by kovrik » Thu, Jul 03, 2014, 12:52 PM UTC

Awesome work, sdegutis!

I love your Zephyros and Phoenix projects. Keep working!

I really miss good tiling wm on MacOS X.

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

#3

Post by kovrik » Thu, Jul 03, 2014, 12:55 PM UTC

Is it possible to move windows from one desktop to another?

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

#4

Post by colinramsay » Thu, Jul 03, 2014, 12:57 PM UTC

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 some more complete code samples but I'm sure that'll come in time.

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

#5

Post by sdegutis » Thu, Jul 03, 2014, 12:58 PM UTC

kovrik wrote: post #2

Awesome work, sdegutis! I love your Zephyros and Phoenix projects. Keep working! I really miss good tiling wm on MacOS X.

<3

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

#6

Post by xbryanx » Thu, Jul 03, 2014, 1:01 PM UTC

This looks great, and reminds me of AutoIt on Windows in some ways.

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

#7

Post by weavie » Thu, Jul 03, 2014, 1:02 PM UTC

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.

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

#8

Post by btown » Thu, Jul 03, 2014, 1:06 PM UTC

For the "closed-source-but-non-programming-power-user" alternative to this, I'm a huge advocate of BetterTouchTool (http://www.boastr.net/). You can easily bind window snaps to everything from keypresses, to four-finger-sweeps on the trackpad, to dragging window titlebars to the screen corners. Also it's so much fun to infuriate friends when they try to use my trackpad and it moves windows all over the place.

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

#9

Post by sdegutis » Thu, Jul 03, 2014, 1:08 PM UTC

btown wrote: post #8

For the "closed-source-but-non-programming-power-user" alternative to this, I'm a huge advocate of BetterTouchTool ( http://www.boastr.net/ ). You can easily bind window snaps to everything from keypresses, to four-finger-sweeps on the trackpad, to dragging window titlebars to the screen corners. Also it's so much fun to infuriate friends when they try to use my trackpad and it moves windows all over the place.

Oh nice! Custom swipes is an excellent idea, I am totally going to have to look into seeing if I can add that to the API.

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

#10

Post by sergiotapia » Thu, Jul 03, 2014, 1:10 PM UTC

If you're looking for a window manager for OSX without having to actually configure anything, you can try using Spectacle: http://spectacleapp.com/

For instance on my imac 27'' I have Option+Command+Left|Right keys mapped to side (similar to windows 7.

And I can also have 4 windows open at once using Shift+Option+Command+Up|Down|Left|Right to move them to the different corners. Works really well with less than 2 minutes of setting the hotkey on a simple GUI configuration window.