Hydra 1.0 | Hacker News Reader

Hydra 1.0

hackhydra.com

32 pointsSmileyKeith29 comments

From the home page it is impossible to tell what the program exactly does. The "documentation" link seems like designed to be impossible to find ;-) Reading the documentation ideas are not introduced in natural order considering that people don't know what you are taking about. Because I'm interested in what the program could do, I'm still trying to figure it out btw... This feedback is here only because I see you have a "buy license" thing and I want your business to succeed, and the current setup is limiting this IMHO.

Thanks for your feedback. I've updated the page accordingly to have a "Learn More" link which leads to a much better place to start reading.

I don't get the complaint about the documentation link. The "Learn More" link takes you to the GitHub Readme, which has a fair bit of documentation and links to everything else one might like including the command line interface project, and a "Resources" section with links to the full API. What's hard to find?

He made that comment before the "Learn More" link took you to the Github page. Before, it said "Documentation" and took you to the /docs page, which was just dumb of me.

Author here. Happy to answer your questions in this thread.

Except for bug reports or feature requests, file those at https://github.com/sdegutis/hydra/issues instead.

Is this project open-source, under some open-source license? Back when we saw it a few weeks ago, it looked like it was an open-source project, but now it looks like you're charging money for it... but the source is on GitHub?

Could you clarify the license / money situation?

I'm writing a blog post to clarify this.

Great work! Love the fast iteration; been using it since I found it on HN, and can't live without it.

Question: what does the license buy you? Are there limitations on usage or functionality without al license? Apologies if it's explained, but I couldn't find details on the site or github.

It'll show a window periodically (without stealing key focus) to remind you to buy a license.

Makes perfect sense. Thanks for making it not too intrusive; not stealing key focus is a huge "nice guy" move.

License purchased.

The thing I keep wondering about with this project is to what extent you can't already do this all with AppleScript, and to the extent you can't, why you wouldn't just add events/routines for AppleScript to get the same effect.

Isn't this mostly just a Lua scripting bridge?

You might be able to do a lot of the same stuff in AppleScript, but that's AppleScript and this is Lua, which to me personally is a huge advantage.

And it's not quite a Lua "scripting bridge". That term usually implies automatic bridging between two programming languages, such as Lua and Objc, but all our bridging is manual.

The "Scripting Bridge" is a way to tie any language in to the Apple Event messaging architecture. I guess you can think of it as bridging Lua to Objc, but it is much more language agnostic than that. This is how you can have automation scripts on OS X writing in Ruby/Python/JavaScript/etc.

I get that your bridging is manual, but if you built on top of the scripting bridge you'd have something much more general, and your "manual" bridging could just be pure Lua code.

Having used "Scripting Bridge" for a few years now, I'm keenly aware of its very real and common caveats, and I'm not comfortable using it in any serious project. If users would like to write something like Hydra using only LuaObjC[1] or something similar, they're free to. But manually bridging function calls gives Hydra a robustness and stability that such an automatic bridge can never truly have.

[1] https://github.com/darrenclark/LuaObjC

I'm sure you wouldn't have bothered with the project if you didn't perceive it as being a better approach. I'm just ignorant to what the advantages are. Is the bridge really unstable? I hadn't noticed that with my admittedly limited exposure.

I'm just weary of any bridge to ObjC, having seen the caveats first-hand. But I suppose it's mostly just in principle.

Do you still plan to keep the project opensource now that you have a license available to purchase?

Yep.

Discussion from a few weeks back:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7982514

Yep. At the time it was still in beta though.

I've been using hydra for a few weeks now and love it so far. Great work sdegutis!

Here's my config for anyone who's curious: https://github.com/andrewhampton/dotfiles

It seems the Mac OSX window manager Phoenix has been deprecation in favor of this new program. I am looking forward to trying it out. Thanks for all the work.

Woo! Love this tool :)

This seems to be doing the exactly wrong thing to do. In the Windows times, these things were called desktop macros. The GUI is not made for being scripted, even less so by moving the mouse.

I know this sounds negative and you probably put a lot of effort into that but if it is what it seems like it is, then I find it horribly wrong.

Personally, I've been using this app for about 2 years now, and I feel way more productive when it's running than when it's not.

Ever heard of xmonad? This project is an attempt to do something similar for OS X users.

XMonad is supposed to have OS X support but I've heard it only works for X11 apps. It'd be great to have XMonad for OS X fully supported because once you get a good config built up it's hard to beat. And if you know Haskell it's even better.

You can totally write XMonad as a Hydra config or extension. Honestly I expect someone to do it any day now, considering how fun it sounds.

If anyone tackles this, please submit it to https://github.com/sdegutis/hydra-ext

EDIT: I forgot that this would require the events feature, which is planned for the 1.1 release. So not all of XMonad is possible in Hydra yet, although most of it is.

This issue[0] was what was keeping xmonad from building for me, though I don't have a mac to try on again.

0: https://github.com/haskell-pkg-janitors/X11/issues/24

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