Automating the Personal

Is there really value in personal automation? I wrote a whole essay on Raycast and I’m still not really sure. Even though xkcd has a helpful chart for how much time you can spend automating a task, the joke is that you’re probably spending too much time.

But it’s so much fun! I’ve seen this referred to as a worry stone or by the Dutch term prutsen. Sometimes it’s okay to waste a bit of time on something trivial.

Anyway: Hammerspoon ¹ is a neat personal automation system that lets you write small Lua scripts to control macOS (that I have been wasting time with lately).

The most common use of Hammerspoon (even included in the getting started guide is window management — adding hotkeys or automations to move windows around. I was more interested in automating keystrokes.

For instance, when writing up PRs on GitHub, I often have to type out the Markdown for a checkbox: - [x]. Five whole characters! For each checkbox! I could make a snippet in Raycast, but then I still have to pop open Raycast and search for the snippet each time. I’d much rather have a single key combination to just immediately print that out.

hs.loadSpoon("LeftRightHotkey")
spoon.LeftRightHotkey:start()

local function typeCheckbox()
    hs.eventtap.keyStrokes("- [x]")
end

spoon.LeftRightHotkey:bind({ "rOpt" }, "x", typeCheckbox)

Now, whenever I press (right-)⌥X,² the Markdown for a checkbox pops right out.

Is this silly? Yes, a little bit. But xkcd’s chart suggests that, if I save 1 second each and use it 5 times a day, then over five years I’ve saved 2 hours!

Here’s a more serious example:

hs.loadSpoon("LeftRightHotkey")
spoon.LeftRightHotkey:start()

local function searchHighlighted()
    hs.eventtap.keyStroke({ "cmd" }, "c")
    hs.timer.doAfter(0.1, function()
        hs.eventtap.keyStroke({ "cmd" }, "f")
        hs.timer.doAfter(0.1, function()
            hs.eventtap.keyStroke({ "cmd" }, "v")
        end)
    end)
end

spoon.LeftRightHotkey:bind({ "rOpt" }, "f", searchHighlighted)

This solves a minor annoyance while browsing the web. Sometimes, I want to search for other usages of a term on a page. Normally, that requires highlighting the term, copying with ⌘C, opening search with ⌘F, then pasting with ⌘V. With this little snippet, I can highlight and press (right)-⌥F to go straight to search.

Theoretically, these hotkeys could then be mapped to a macropad like the BNK8... but I don’t actually have a good reason to buy one of those, as tempted as I may be.

More broadly, you have the full power of Lua as a scripting language, so you can do pretty wild stuff. I have a script that uses a regex to look through my pasteboard for URLs, which can then get dumped into a Markdown link format ([]()) at the press of a hotkey. You can see all these in my init.lua on GitHub.

Hammerspoon is fun largely because Lua is simple (in the “Simple Made Easy” sense), easy to learn, and amenable to LLMs (because I don’t want to spend too much time tinkering). My configs were largely written with the help of Claude — with no context on Lua, I tossed it the prompt “Write a hammerspoon config that maps f13 + x to typing out - [x]”. Claude hallucinated a couple APIs, but that’s fine; the output gave me enough of a hook on Lua that I was able to correct the rest myself.

In Other News

• I’ve had an FL Studio license for almost as long as I can remember (a gift in middle school, I think), but only recently did I sit down to really learn it. I’m still a beginner, but I am embarrassed to say my first thought was to make some ambient drone.
• We made another zine! If you’re in the Bay Area, come check out the launch party!