Stapler: I remade a 32 year old classic Macintosh app | Hacker News Reader

Stapler: I remade a 32 year old classic Macintosh app

blog.gingerbeardman.com

219 pointsmsephton70 comments

Any chance this could add launching windows to specific positions/sizes and/or, more importantly, to specific spaces?

It still feels nuts to me that we have all this stuff and yet when entering/exiting 'work mode' I have to either leave everything running indefinitely or reposition all my work apps every time I launch them.

I leave everything running. I have a dozen spaces filled with assortments of windows for different tasks. It’s a real pain because some apps (such as the browser) have windows open on all of the spaces and macOS really doesn’t like it when you have the same application in multiple different spaces. Clicking a link in an email is such a roll of the dice (as to which space I’ll end up in and which browser window will receive the new tab) that I don’t bother clicking and test copy paste the link where I want it to open.

It’s especially bad when I need to restart the browser because then all the windows get collected into one space again. Also annoying that relaunching the browser reopens all those windows in the first place.

I like the idea of this app for launching a collection of apps together but the application is the wrong level of granularity. I don’t want all of my browser windows at once. I want just one of them along with the windows of other applications that match that task.

I bet there’s some combination of tools I could cobble together and customize to achieve this but I don’t want to work that hard at it. I really should be able to just open up a new space, open up and arrange all the windows I want to work with on tasks for that space, and then press save and give it a name.

Then I should be able to close that space and reopen it by name any time I like, with all of the windows exactly as I left them, regardless of whether or not any of those applications are open on other spaces.

I think this is the dream, but we're paddling upstream here as the OS itself is app-centric and apps are mostly document-centric.

Xerox Star & Smalltalk had the task-centric approach and Alan Kay @alankay has said that Steve Jobs/Apple missed that aspect in their takeaway from their visit: "(they) missed a few things about the GUI. For example, that it had unlimited and persistent “desktops” which could be used to sustain work/projects over time without having to tear down and build up, and without stovepiped apps, etc."

https://www.quora.com/What-was-it-like-to-be-at-Xerox-PARC-w...

So happy that I could remember enough of this story to find that link.

Crossing the streams (see: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41217330>, and I know msephton has), task-centric UI seems to me to have traditionally been accomplished on Unix-like platforms through directories (often task/project-related), and Makefiles, which can combine a set of related operations across a large number of tools in a single context.

Neither of these are, of course, user-friendly for the vast majority of people. But they do afford some thoughts, concepts, and mechanisms which might be used in task-oriented UI design.

The Lisa was doc-centric so Apple definitely didn't miss that aspect. They abandoned it because harddrives were expensive and needed a cheaper base system running single apps off floppy.

I think they called them "contexts" on Lisa, but as you say it was referred to as document-centric. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1CvRKdV0Ls

But Alan Kay was talking about task-centric, not document-centric, which I'd argue Lisa wasn't quite doing fully.

Happy to talk about this more if you think I'm mistaken. And you'll need to let Alan Kay know :)

> Also annoying that relaunching the browser reopens all those windows in the first place.

This is the browser's decision, not macOS's, though. At least for Firefox, you can turn it off ("Open previous windows and tabs" in General > Startup).

I don’t want to lose all those windows and tabs though.

I guess what I really want isn’t possible without either ugly hacks or a total rearchitect of the operating system: the elimination of the “stovepipe” applications paradigm.

Applications should not own their windows, the operating system should. In practice this would mean an application is not a program you invoke by clicking on it. Instead it should be a library you install that tells the operating system how to read, display, edit, and write certain kinds of documents or document-like resources (such as web pages).

Then it would be easy for the operating system to offer unlimited persistent desktops that need to only remember which resources are open and a bit of metadata controlling the appearance of each window (position, shape, size, view setting).

I dunno—I see the appeal of what you say, but, on the other hand, the closer the OS comes to locking in different things that an app might want to do, the more we risk the iOS set-up where you can use any browser you want, as long as it's WebKit. That is, one unified paradigm is great, as long as you like that paradigm!

I guess one can image a "skinnable" OS, where the OS enforces, say, one approach to window management on all apps, but there are options for what the One True Window Management strategy is. I'm sure I'm describing something in Linux, but I'm a Mac user and so not used to such freedom.

Agreed. It’s weird because the basic app+window UX in macOS (in which an app can be running with no windows open) implies the task based behavior that Stapler is trying to support.

I'm not sure the current app/window paradigm does suggest that, see my sibling reply.

Fair. It sounds like earlier tech went further than the macOS UX.

It’s a shame we don’t have better task support. macOS has been slowly shidting further towards app-centric workfkows. I suppose this is in line with app stores, web apps and mobile OSs being the more common computer interfaces now. It’s disappointing, in my opinion.

We've left so many great and useful things behind in the name of "progress". I encourage you to try old systems, even just for as long as it takes to type a document, edit an image, or manage some windows, organise some files, to see how they all did things and what each brought to the desktop.

Here's a playlist of demos of great but obsolete operating systems: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfF-zlMNYMd_ZioGb0BKd...

I would recommend using another tool to script those sorts of changes to the workspace, and then adding that to the Stapler Document.

There is an app called Stay that remembers positions of Windows based on the app, title, etc. I used it for a while, but not recently. https://cordlessdog.com/stay/

You're not alone with this desire, and I still haven't found a good solution. I want to bookmark all apps and windows when working on something and recall them all later when I resume work. How is this not yet a thing when do much real work involves using so many different applications?.

There is an app, Workspaces, I think, but it's not useful enough to bother using.

Probably should be a macos feature one day

KDE Activities

There's probably something more comprehensive and recent, but I couldn't find it:

What is an activity in KDE and what can I do with it? https://askubuntu.com/a/705835

Moom⁽¹⁾ offers the ability to save and restore window layouts, including triggering saved layouts on addition or removal of displays.

⁽¹⁾https://manytricks.com/moom/

$10 is incredibly reasonable for this product, thank you for sharing.

You’re welcome.

I’ve been a Moom user for a long time, and the craziest thing to me is when they had to change⁽²⁾ from using a miniature rectangular grid for positioning and resizing a window to a slanted hexagonal grid because of a patent⁽³⁾.

⁽²⁾https://manytricks.com/blog/?p=4618

⁽³⁾https://patents.google.com/patent/US20090300541A1/en

I wonder if they experimented with adding app/document launches into the mix? Seems like the missing piece.

I also have wanted this for a long time, is there a limitation on macOS that prevents this? It doesn’t sound that hard but maybe if apis aren’t there it is.

First, make sure that: System Preferences > General > Desktop & Dock > Windows > Close windows when quitting an application = OFF

Then leave the windows of an app open as you quit it. When you next launch the app its windows will restore to their previous size and position. If you close the windows first, then the app will restore to having no windows open.

In Sonoma, the same preference is there, but it's one level less nested: System Settings > Desktop & Dock etc.

I use Keyboard Maestro to do this for my needs.

May not work for every case.

Can you say a bit more about how you've set this up in Keyboard Maestro? Thanks

Sure!

I have a bunch on windows in an app, that tend to move to a different monitor after the machine goes to sleep.

Each window has a different title, which is something KM can act on, so I've made an action that moves each individual window to a specific place. I've tied this action to Alt-P (for "place"), so I can manually correct when they've drifted.

So it's not a generic "put all windows where I left them" solution, but it's a hell of a lot better than manually doing the same thing several times a day.

Nice! I do something similar with my laptop using Hammerspoon: when it detects my external keyboard is connected over USB it does some setup for my desk/mobile environment (repositions dock, quits some apps, launches some apps, etc). I manage my windows in quarters and thirds using keyboard, so they don't really move about.

> more importantly, to specific spaces?

Apple does not provide APIs for that. A handful of apps control spaces, and all of them by automating GUI actions.

We might be looking for this:

https://github.com/FancyWM/fancywm

It’s an odd way of thinking about working on a computer—it’s task-based rather than app-based or document-based.

If I've one frustration with computer interfaces, dating back to the 1990s, it's this. If anything it's become worse with time as apps, both desktop and mobile though especially the latter, become more self-centric, to the point of having their own, non-filesystem-based, data silos. I understand some of the security reasons for this (apps are themselves increasingly untrusted and untrustworthy, and data-sharing is a significant risk). But it is extraordinarily frustrating when trying to work with multiple tools.

Modern MacOS is particularly pernicious in that I'm often working between multiple applications, but on the same project, and the friction of raising and lowering all app-associated windows as I cycle between these, often navigating to a workspace I'd not meant to go to, is quietly maddening.

The Linux / X-Windows notion of focus-follows-mouse addresses this somewhat. Your current app is whatever the mouse happens to be on top of. On MacOS this simply isn't available, though there are some ... hints of this. E.g., if I happen to have the mouse over a browser window I can scroll that window with the mouse. But if I then, say, hit Cmd-W to close that tab ... suddenly the actually focused app which I'd forgetten about gets a kick in its nethers. This happens to me several times a week, if not per day.

I don't know that Stapler is the true solution to this, but it does seem to track in that direction.

The history of Operating System development is really interesting in that the decisions of what the atomic element of the system are (files, documents, or applications) lock all future development into a certain path, but all the choices not made then have to be somewhat retrofit into the design. For decades systems have dwelled in a kind of morass where they seem to focus on trying to implement different variants of the other two, with one of these atomic elements as the core concept.

For example, the dominant atomic concept in Xerox Star was the document [1]. Documents are an abstraction just above files. A webpage is a document, but is made up of numerous files like the graphics, fonts, executable scripts, etc. Document oriented systems like Star also deemphasize applications. The system is supposed to open up the correct application(s) when you choose to interact with a document. But even with this as the core abstraction, the system still had to provide methods to work directly with files and applications.

Other systems, like Plan 9, nixes, MS-DOS, CP/M, etc. focus on the file as the atomic primitive and try to build around that. But when things moved to GUIs, many of the development teams focused on the Applications. Windows 3.x famously only showed users organized collections of applications, with file management as just another application. But Windows 3.x was sitting on top of DOS which oriented itself around files. The nixes in the meanwhile forgot about documents almost entirely.

Where I think they've failed to evolve is not in reimplementing these three things over and over, but in assembling them into useful, higher-level, abstractions. What I really think is missing is a way to assemble two higher-levels: workplaces which implement workflows.

Pipes and scripts sort of mimic workflows, and desktops sort of mimic workplaces, but these concepts have really stalled and there's almost no real system-level tooling for building these things, especially in a GUI. For example, scripts are really used as a kind of a way to assemble pipes into pseudo applications + automation, but it's hard to turn them into real workflow tools, and desktops just allow you to dump a bunch of application windows and files into one place, but there isn't any real scoping to it.

1 - https://youtu.be/xJzYRgmnJrE

The Star's document seems similar to me to a project folder or perhaps a composite archival format: tar, WARC, EPub, etc. The latter are useful for keeping various assets together, though at the cost of complexity when working with them. Makefile management ties together a set of resources and independent tools in a different way.

Check out my comment about Xerox Star & Smalltalk and what Apple missed from their visit to PARC: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41215350

I saw that, appreciate it, and agree ;-)

My mind went to http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/simstapler

You're not the only one! My friend Japhy Riddle said the same. Classic Mac Users, eh? :)

This is really cool — I’ve wondered why something like this didn’t exist for a long time and I’m looking forward to checking it out.

Thanks for filling in the gaps for all of us who don’t just use one app at a time!

Power users of the world, unite!

Nice! Similar to Brett Terpstra's Bunch[1] which has a GUI-less approach.

[1]: https://bunchapp.co/

Thanks for sharing! This is new to me.

The documents saved by Stapler are also plain text (JSON). But because the app is trying to be a model citizen in the current model of macOS security/annoyance, it contains the file bookmarks that macOS gives us (which are binary blobs encoded as Base64 text, so incomprehensible to mere humans) rather than the human-readable file paths you might expect. Kind of annoying, but there we go!

Couldn't you do all of that with fairly simple, native Shortcuts? Or even Automator scripts?

One could do anything far less conveniently.

An Alfred workflow

Indeed that would work but it is definitely more difficult to set up and maintain. New workflow (enter data), new action (enter files). And so on. But I do love Alfred!

This is cool.

I've had a desire for something like this (windows/linux) -- what would be cool is if it knew the window size and layouts?

So you could do a launch group that will do the whole desktops workspace - and can be saved (but also has a reset button to snap back to the layout if you mix things up. Support for a second desktop to launch then to - so you can throw one context cluster on each...)

---

Weren't you the one who lost all their archive content? What was the timeline with all of that?

If you quit and relaunch the app with windows open it will remember its documents positions and sizes. That function comes for free with a Document-Based App.

If you want the Document to control the properies of the desktop, then I would write a little Automator app, shell script, Shortcut, etc. to do that and then add that to the Stapler Document. Use all available tools together.

---

Internet Archive: yes, that was me. Most of my account data is still gone. I don't think the deleted data will ever be restored. And so it goes. The blog post about that one has been updated with this info. Thanks for asking.

I'm always curious to know whats the motivation behind these kind of side projects ? Is it just to scratch a technical itch ? To build a product for oneself because you are not really happy with anything else on the market ? Learn a new skillset ? Enhance the resume with a new cool project ?

At least for me, side projects are just another hobby. Some do woodworking, some garden, and very rarely is a hobby actually about the product.

Most IT people around me, like myself, enjoy building things. A side project is a good opportunity to do so "just because", without bullshit you don't like - no bureaucracy or approval, no story points, no project meetings, no design documents, writing tests and documentation is up to you. You just sit down, do, and get the feeling of actually making progress in a reasonable time and at the end of the day, having built something. It's energizing.

Sometimes, it is about the product though, and you build yourself a nice tool because you aren't happy with what's out there. Of course, the two goals can often be combined - and at the very least, some useful product is a good excuse to practice the enjoyable hobby.

For me it was to scratch the itch of creation. I live for the buzz of creation. There was also a degree of wanting to see how it was to create an app using the latest tools that I don't normally use, I link to a tweet where I suddenly decide to try and make this app, a flash of inspiration that it should be possible. If it had been more difficult, I would have surely given up and the app would not exist. But it was "easy" enough, and here we are. Plus, the original app has been stuck in my brain for a long time and I remembered it fondly. So, there are many factors... but adding things to my resume is not one of them.

I like this. Curious as to how it plays along with the mess that is Stage Manager…

Do let me know! For my sins, I've never used Stage Manager.

Well, right now the app itself doesn't work for me. I create a new document, drag a couple of images onto it, save the document, and it goes blank.

I tried adding a folder and Visual Studio Code as the things to open (because Visual Studio Code can open, well, anything, and this way I could at least start up a workspace) and got the same result.

I can't reproduce this, but it's been filed as bug on GitHub so I'll look into it. https://github.com/gingerbeardman/stapler/issues/3

This issue has been resolved in version 1.1

I wonder what the executable size of the original app was. Of course, 471 KB for a modern app, including both x86-64 and ARM64 builds, is pretty good.

Stapler 1.1 (1993) is 223KB (68K-only)

LaunchList 0.8 (2009) is 880KB (Intel-only)

...but interestingly LaunchList contained an unused "test" icon file weighing 320KB(!) so really it is 560KB.

Tic-tac-toe desk accessory with the minimal DA support in system 10.4 .. running right now.. that binary is close to 40 years old if I am not mistaken.

Can you please share more details about this? Links? Thanks

Edit: ah, I think you're referring to Mac OS X Classic Environment running old system in which you're running the old Desk Accessory. Matryoshka dolls!

no it is not "classic" nor Matryoshka .. there is a bit of wrapper code that was introduced in the OS 9 transition, and that code still executes under OSX..

Then, please, I need to know more about this! :) a link, a screenshot, whatever you can provide.

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    /* `.f.?2@.?.Q???Q? */
        $"FFB4 45FA 009E 7E3F 7200 1422 B202 6404"            
    /* ??E?.?~?r.."?.d. */
        $"1202 2007 51CF FFF4 4A01 6610 723F 558F"            
    /* .. .Q???J.f.r?U? */
        $"A861 301F C041 6100 FD42 66F2 3600 6100"            
    /* ?a0.?Aa.?Bf?6.a. */
        $"FDFE 5189 2038 0A02 D191 7E05 487A 0080"            
    /* ??Q? 8?.ё~.Hz.? */
        $"A8A4 7005 2040 A03B 51CF FFF2 41FA 0066"            
    /* ??p. @?;Q???A?.f */
        $"30BC 0001 3003 7202 6000 FE10 0000 0000"            
    /* 0?..0.r.`.?..... */
        $"0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000"            
    /* ................ */
        $"0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000"            
    /* ................ */
        $"0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000"            
    /* ................ */
        $"0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000"            
    /* ................ */
        $"0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000"            
    /* ................ */
        $"0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0002 0000"            
    /* ................ */
        $"0000 0000 0000 0008 0008 0018 0018 0009"            
    /* ...............? */
        $"0009 004A 004A 0032 0064 0082 018C 0780"            
    /* .?.J.J.2.d.?.?.? */
        $"0440 0840 0C80 1380 1100 2100 2200 4200"            
    /* .@.@.?.?..!.".B. */
        $"4400 8400 8800 F000 E000 C000 8000 0780"            
    /* D.?.?.?.?.?.?..? */
        $"07C0 0FC0 0F80 1F80 1F00 3F00 3E00 7E00"            
    /* .?.?.?.?..?.>.~. */
        $"7C00 FC00 F800 F000 0000 0000 0000 0010"            
    /* |.?.?.?......... */
        $"0000 FFFF 8000 8000 8000 8000 8000 8000"            
    /* ..???.?.?.?.?.?. */
        $"8000 8000 8000 8000 8000 8000 8000 8000"            
    /* ?.?.?.?.?.?.?.?. */
        $"8000 FFFF 8000 8000 83E0 8FF8 8E38 9C1C"            
    /* ?.???.?.?????8?. */
        $"980C 980C 980C 9C1C 8E38 8FF8 83E0 8000"            
    /* ?.?.?.?.?8?????. */
        $"8000 FFFF 8000 8000 980C 9C1C 8E38 8770"            
    /* ?.???.?.?.?.?8?p */
        $"83E0 81C0 83E0 8770 8E38 9C1C 980C 8000"            
    /* ???????p?8?.?.?. */
        $"8000 0001 0401 0801 0C01 1001 1401 1801"            
    /* ?............... */
        $"1C01 2001 2401 2801 2C01 3001 3401 3801"            
    /* .. .$.(.,.0.4.8. */
        $"3C01 0004 0104 0204 0304 1004 1104 1204"            
    /* <............... */
        $"1304 2004 2104 2204 2304 3004 3104 3204"            
    /* .. .!.".#.0.1.2. */
        $"3304 0010 0110 0210 0310 0410 0510 0610"            
    /* 3............... */
        $"0710 0810 0910 0A10 0B10 0C10 0D10 0E10"            
    /* ....?.?......... */
        $"0F10 0014 0114 0214 0314 0011 0411 0811"            
    /* ................ */
        $"0C11 030F 070F 0B0F 0F0F 0C0C 0D0C 0E0C"            
    /* ................ */
        $"0F0C 0005 1005 2005 3005 0303 1303 2303"                
    /* ...... .0.....#. */
        $"3303 0015 0313 0C0D 0F0B 0C0D 0F0B"                     
    /* 3............. \*/
    };

If you would like to reveal anything more fully about this, feel free to reach out to me via my website or social media accounts. I think that me asking for further clarification here is not going to be very fruitful. Thanks

How attractive was the old UI? I really wish my mac could look just like that today. Okay okay, maybe with dark mode at night!

It really was, still is. It's been downhill since, in many ways.

So, is this basically a tray editor for .sh files that just contain a list of applications/shortcuts to run?

No :) but that's a close approximation.

The editor is a native macOS window that's kind of like list view in a file manager, or a spreadsheet, or a little folder...depending on your point of view. Plus some menu commands and keyboard equivalents.

The items in each list are macOS "bookmarks" which are a type of authorised/verified/secure alias (in fact, they're still called aliases in the code) that have been around for about 10–15 years. They contain the path plus a bunch more info. As macOS becomes more locked-down the recommended way of accessing files is to retrieve these bookmarks through the normal layers of system permissions and security. Without the bookmarks, for example just using plain text paths, I would not be able to show the full images in Quick Look or easily launch the list items. A key benefit is that the bookmark will still resolve if the file is moved somewhere else on the same disk, or even to a different volume!

Here's more info on file bookmarks: https://eclecticlight.co/2020/05/21/bookmarks-a-type-of-alia...

I store the items as JSON in the saved file, simply because I prefer it to XML (which is the main/default option). I wanted the files to still be human readable and editable to a degree.

The files are launched using the default app specified by that file, so it can be changed on a per-file basis. Individual images might open in an image editor, image viewer, app to run OCR, script to run OCR on it, etc.

If anyone uses KDE Plasma, you probably already know how broken activities are.

Can we make it more like Stapler?

I was disappointed it wasn't MacPlaymate he remade ;p It had a boss key that would show a spreadsheet image.

One of my oldest games, Wire Hang Redux, had a boss key that would make it look like Notepad/TextEdit. https://www.mobygames.com/game/109304/wire-hang-redux/screen...

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